Lorde’s new album, Virgin, might be oozing with synth sounds, but it turns out that there’s also one particularly noteworthy guitar part in Shapeshifter, the record’s third track.
Speaking to the Tape Notes Podcast, Lorde and producer Jim-E Stack have confirmed that this was the work of Andrew Aged of American duo Inc No World, but the truth is that it doesn’t actually sound like a guitar at all.
“Almost everyone thinks it’s strings,” says Lorde of the cinematic stabs that arrive about 90 seconds in and are used at various points from then onwards. Not so, though, as Stack explains.
“It’s just VG-8,” he says, referring to the first product in Roland’s V-Guitar range, which was released back in 1995.
“It’s kind of like a MIDI Roland pedalboard of sorts that you play through with guitar. There’s a bunch of different presets and stuff to VG-8. They’re like insanely expensive now on Reverb.”
He’s not kidding - you can find VG-8s being listed for upwards of $2,000 these days, so what makes them so special? The answer is Roland’s Composite Object Sound Modeling (COSM) technology, which is capable not only of modelling not only the likes of guitars, amos, speakers and mics, but also translating your playing into sounds of the sort that the guitar doesn’t normally produce.
It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t MIDI, though: used with a suitable pickup, the VG-8 takes the nuances of your playing and processes them in real-time, creating - in Stack’s words - “MIDI kind of sounding stuff but with that real live feel.”
The end result on Shapeshifter sounds undeniably string-like, and there are actually some real cellos in there as well. “We really did sort of agonise over whether to have real strings on the song because strings are really not a hallmark of, like, Lorde music. It’s not like a tool I reach for,” says the New Zealand star.
“For me [with] strings there’s like a prowess that I don’t feel like I’ve earned as a musician,” she adds. “And it always feels a little like stolen valour for me when I try to reach for them. But eventually on the song, we just decided that it was what was needed.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Stack reveals that there’s one synth sound in Shapeshifter that he used on multiple Virgin tracks. “There’s this OP-1 patch I made, and that’s kind of like subtly somewhere on everything,” he says. “It’s in What Was That, it’s in David - it kind of shows up everywhere in one form or another.”
You can check out the full Tape Notes episode with Lorde and Jim-E Stack wherever you get your podcasts.
