In Part I of my interview with rock guitar innovator and King Crimson frontman Adrian Belew, he discussed the small and big steps that, upon hindsight, marked his path from obscure talent to respected virtuoso. Reading between the lines, you still may not figure out how he remains so nonchalant about his contribution and roles in some of rock’s most memorable bands and albums. But listen to Belew play guitar and hear the songs he’s penned and you get it­—he does so for the sake of music, for the function lust and not for the chicks, the status, the drugs, or the money much beyond making a living. He is far more interested in invention than hit records, and thank the gods for that. Because for all the haircuts and tattoos bastardizing the art and the role of the rock guitarist, Adrian Belew is there to remind us that there is still so much to discover—in the notes, the technique, and the technology, which brings us to Part II.

Crawdaddy!: I recently read your gear list in Premier Guitar and found it to be surprisingly compact for how many sounds and effects you can pull out of it.

Adrian Belew: Well, it’s interesting that you say that, because one of the things that I am trying really hard to do right now is to make my full setup more compact. I would like to get to the point where I play through a computer and a small pedal board, and plug into a PA wherever I go, and that’s it. That’s what I’m aiming for right now, and it’s a lot of work. I think it’s available. I think the technology is finally there, but for me, of course, it’s like starting all over again—to map out programs, the MIDI, and all that stuff. The first thing you have to do is cover all the things you already do, it’s kind of like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly—the first part is the really hard, slow bit. You’ve got to find ways to do everything you’ve been doing with all this other gear, and now you’ve got to find ways to do it with just a computer or one or two pieces of gear. And then, when you get through that, I think, then you turn into the butterfly. You get to the point where now you know the new gear so well that you can really start creating things with it. I’m just at the very edge of the starting of my metamorphosis.

Crawdaddy!: Are you talking about using software and plug-ins for your effects or just getting your computer to manage all the hardware?

Adrian Belew: I’m talking about using software, yeah, and hardware. But the hardware that I’m looking at right now will eventually be software anyway, because that’s where it’s headed. The people that are the high-quality manufacturers of this kind of stuff, they’re all headed that direction anyway. And there was a decisive reason why I took this task upon myself, and that was, last year, my Power Trio suddenly turned into an international touring band. We toured 10 months out of last year, almost all of it exclusively outside of this country—Russia, Europe, Australia. Before that, we did Japan and festivals in Canada. And I just realized that it’s not affordable, nor is it even practical, to carry a lot of gear. You just can’t do it. It doesn’t arrive, it gets damaged, it’s extremely expensive, and you are totally at the whim of the airlines. I’ll give you an example: To go to Australia, I took one amplifier head in one case and one other case, the same size, that has my pedals in it—this is what I call the Baby Rig. And that is the least amount of stuff that I can possibly have to do what I do for my show. Well, the first time we put it on a plane, it cost $25.00. The next time we were charged $1,700! And you were totally at their mercy. They can charge whatever they want. Another thing that can happen—and this is exactly what happened to me in Rome—I chill up there and none of [my gear] arrives, and I have to go out and rent a Fender amp and play the show through that, which is unimaginable for me. It stressed me out to have to do that. My music is based on technology. It’s how I write; it’s how I’m inspired. I make the guitar do things it’s not supposed to do—turning things around backwards, creating combinations of things that only can happen through certain electronics—that’s what I do. And if you put me with a Fender amp and a guitar, well, you get a different guy, and it’s not nearly as interesting.

Crawdaddy!: And that’s not who the audience came to see.

Adrian Belew: Yeah, and I’m very disappointed because there we are, we’re ready, we can normally just blast away and have such a great time and everybody is so happy and we can get people so excited, and instead you get this really nervous, bad concert.

Crawdaddy!: Did you find yourself explaining to the audience in Rome what happened?

Adrian Belew: Well, I would have liked to, but most of the people there didn’t speak English so… [Laughs] You’re kind of at a loss to even explain to them and it doesn’t really work that well—making apologies. I don’t really believe in doing that, if you can avoid it. I think it’s better to plow through and make the best of it. But my hopes for the future are that A) we will be touring around the world, and B) it will be with me carrying a computer and a guitar on my back.

Crawdaddy!: What software effects are you using right now?

Adrian Belew: I’m trying a lot of different ones at the moment right now. I’m trying the Native Instruments one—there are some great libraries in there for orchestral sounds and synthesizers. They also have a guitar program called Guitar Rig 3 that I’m working with. I’m working with another box that’s called Axe FX [by Fractal Audio Systems] that might end up being software too, and it might be the one I end up going with, I’m not sure. But right out of the box, I feel more comfortable with what it can do. It’s a very high-quality guitar processor, although, as I said, it’s not in a computer yet.

Crawdaddy!: Have you used Line 6’s Amp Farm or IK’s Amplitube?

Adrian Belew: Yes, I’ve done a lot with the Line 6 stuff, and it may be that I‘ll get that mixed in too, because right now my setup, as you probably read in PG, involves Line 6 amps. I have, basically, three different guitar setups. One is the VG-99 Virtual Guitar by Roland, the second is my Johnson amp, which was made by DigiTech but is out of production (and that’s where most of my sounds come from currently), and then the third thing is a Line 6 Vetta 2. So, I’ve figured out how to replace all the sounds in the Johnson and the Vetta 2 in order to do this computer idea. I’m trying it; it’s going to be a lot of work.

Crawdaddy!: I think you’re up to the task. So it sounds like maybe the effects dictate the songwriting or does the songwriting dictate the effects?

Adrian Belew: Well, for me, when I get something new, I get very excited and I get very inspired, so a lot of times the song comes out of that. I will create some new sound or some new animal, for example, and I’ll say, “Now what do I do with this?” You’ve got to find a place for that effect to live that has a musical meaning. When I found a way for my guitar to grunt like a rhino, for example, I wrote the song “Lone Rhino.” I mean, what else would you do? There’s no real reason to have your guitar grunt like a rhino, you have to have a reason for it. [Laughs]

Crawdaddy!: And likewise, with King Crimson’s “Elephant Talk”?

Adrian Belew: Exactly right. I had that song in my arsenal, and on the day we started fooling around with the basics for that song, everybody started saying, “That sounds like an elephant
.” And of course, I thought, “Well, all right then, it’s got to have something to do with an elephant.” Turns out, it really has nothing to do with an elephant! [Laughs]

Crawdaddy!: Let’s talk about your new Parker Fly guitar, which is just amazing. Every year, new guitars come out at trade shows and they are all very nice, but the Adrian Belew Parker Fly is just an out-of-this-world beast. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Adrian Belew: Well, it started four years ago, when I decided to switch to Parker Flys. The original reason I switched was because I’ve always thought that it was the most unique and revolutionary thing that has happened to the guitar since [Gibson] Les Pauls and Fenders of the ’50s. Everything else since then has been a variation on the Les Paul or the Fender, but not the Parker Fly. Ken Parker spent two decades creating the perfect guitar that would resonate perfectly, stay perfectly in tune, be light as a feather, never have any intonation problems, and have a great tremolo that always came back true. The list of things that he was able to do with the invention of the Parker Fly is so impressive that for years I wanted to play one but couldn’t because I was so used to having my guitar be MIDI to go through synthesizers and keyboards and things. So we attempted to make the most state-of-the-art electric guitar starting with the basic Parker Fly and really just changed the electronics.

There’s this thing by Line 6 called the Variax, which models 25 vintage guitars—you can play a 12-string, or a sitar, or a Gibson, a Fender, a Rickenbacker… it has all these wonderful sounds, so we decided to put that in as well. We wanted to be as up to the minute as possible!