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Jim Laing
Guitarist Peter Thorn
Interview Excerpt
Peter Thorn is the perfect example of the fact that if someone who is willing to take the giant step of leaving home for the big city and work hard at his craft, a lot of really good things can happen along the way. As you’ll soon read, Peter left his native Canada for Hollywood, soaked up as much information has he could, worked constantly on his chops and sound, and eventually became a much in-demand session and touring guitarist and artist in his own right. Peter is a shining example of a professional musician - excellent chops, excellent sounds (who sings great as well), yet easy-going, humble and approachable. Below he outlines his keys to success.
How about some of your background?
I grew up in Edmonton, Canada and started playing guitar when I was fourteen. When I was nineteen, I moved to Los Angeles to go to Musician’s Institute and attended that for a year. When I got out of school I joined a band with a couple of older musicians who were pretty well known in LA (Frank Simes and Jennifer Condos) who were touring with Don Henley at the time. Frank had a bunch of songs and was trying to get a record deal when he wasn’t playing with Don. It was cool because they were much older than me - they were in their mid-thirties and I was like nineteen - so I learned a lot from those people. I spent about five years in the band and we did a record for Japan and Southeast Asia. When that ended around 1995, I started doing a lot of sessions and touring.
Right now I’m playing with Chris Cornell but before I played with a bunch of other artists like Jewel, Daniel Powter, Alicia Keys and Courtney Love. I was also in the group Five For Fighting for a while and toured with them.
What’s your live setup like?
With Chris I’m using a “wet-dry-wet” rig which uses an typical head and speaker cabinet combination, but takes a tap taken off the signal that’s going to the cabinet. That’s fed at line level out to some some effects that are fed into a stereo power amp that’s connected to a couple of cabinets that sit on either side of the main one in the center. So the center cabinet is the dry, direct guitar sound and the outside cabs have a stereo delay or a bit of reverb in them. That allows both me and the sound man to have independent control over the dry signal and a blend of the stereo effects, so if I’ve got a stereo Leslie thing going on, or stereo delays bouncing back and forth on those outside cabs, he can control it if he thinks he’s got too much in the house. The other thing is I can mix the dry signal into the wet cabinets to get louder if I need to for a solo boost or something. It’s just a very flexible way to do it.
What kind of amps?
Right now I’m using a few different things. In the studio I’ll use all manner of different amps from vintage amps like Fenders and Marshalls and weird things like Supros, but on the road I use a combination of different heads. I’m using one built by a guy named John Suhr (suhrguitars.com) that’s a custom-made head based on his OD-100 amp and called a PT-100 for my name. It has two channels - one that’s Fender clean, and one that’s a Marshall-like distortion channel. I also use a Divided By Thirteen (dividedby13.com) RSA-31 head, which is another boutique amp. At times I’ll also use an amp by Comet (electrosonicamplifiers.com), so I’m sort of a boutique amp guy. I like the hand-wired, small company stuff.
What guitars do you take with you?
With Chris I’m using five different Les Pauls, as well as a Darco model which is like a 335, then I have a tele and two strat-like guitars built by John Suhr.
What are your effects?
Right now I’ve got the TC G-System which is my MIDI controller as well as a loop switcher that I can integrate various pedals like a Trinity overdrive, a Boss Fuzz, Line6 rotary simulator and a Peterson tuner that are on the pedal board. Back in the rack for the wet-dry-wet system I use a unit called the Axe-Fx (fractalaudio.com), which is a two rack space processor that’s like a big super powerful Pod because it has amp simulators and everything in it, but I’m only using it for effects. So I have the TC and all the pedals in front of the amp (signal-wise) and then post-amp I have the Axe-Fx for long delays and reverbs and stuff like that.
What do you usually bring with you to the studio?
I don’t bring much any more because if I’m working at (producer/writer) Linda Perry’s, she has so much stuff there that it’s sort of fun to go and just pick through the stuff that’s there. (authors note: Linda’s studio has the most fantastic collection of vintage gear I’ve ever seen in a studio, and I’ve been in 100’s of studios all over the word.) If I am going to do a session on my own and I need to bring something, I’ll bring the TC pedal board and either a 1x12 or a 2x12 speaker cabinet with these little heads built by Suhr called Badgers - there’s one that’s 18 watts and another that’s thirty watts. I really like them because they’re versatile and sound great with pedals. For guitars, I’ll try to bring a Les Paul, a Strat, a Tele, and maybe one acoustic.
Do you have any tips as a session musician?
I would say an important thing for me is to serve the song at all times. Try to keep an open mind and if someone has an idea in the room then always let that idea be heard. If it involves you trying something different in the part that you’re playing, you can’t get defensive about it. You have to just let it happen because that really goes a long way towards creating a good atmosphere in the room. When everybody drops their ego and just tries to serve the song, I find that the best idea will rise to the surface and everybody will recognize it. It’s human nature to want our ideas to be the best ones, but if you can be open to others suggestions you can learn something and maybe do something that you wouldn’t have thought of doing.
Now that you’ve worked your way up through the ranks to where you are now, what kind of advice would you give to someone who’s just working in a club or cover band?
If you’re in a bar band and playing covers, it really depends upon your goals and aspirations. A lot of people don’t want to write songs and go any further than that because they’re happy just playing on the weekends, so then it comes down to honing your songs and your chops and maybe taking singing lessons to make sure that your background vocals are really tight.
If what you’re trying to do is break out to have a career as an artist, I’d be playing in the clubs on the weekends but be constantly writing songs and recording as much as possible. When I first moved to LA in that band I was telling you about, we’d go play cover gigs two or three nights a week for fun and to make some money, but during the week we’d always be writing and recording. We cranked out about 50 songs over a couple year period and that eventually got us a record deal (which is what everyone wanted back then). When you do that you just get better and better at writing and honing the sound of your band. I’ve got a lot of friends who played in cover bands, particularly where I came from in Canada because there was a really strong cover band scene there, but they never were really able to bust out of that because all they did was play covers and never tried to write anything. But like I said, it all depends on your goals. Some people don’t want the work that comes along with developing your own music because they only want to do it for fun.
One of the things that will really help if you’re in a cover band is to work individually on your parts before you get to rehearsal because you can get so much more done. You can get through a lot of songs if everyone has done their homework because it’s just fine tuning the song in rehearsal at that point.
Copyright © 2012 Bobby Owsinski Media
Author - Producer
Music and Technology Advisor
