Thorough to the point of being stoic, this bassist expresses himself from the highest peaks: this is tetsu. Fully testing his newly-obtained five-string bass, he treats us to his intricately refined playing with the release of L’Arc~en~Ciel’s new album, KISS. “It might sound a bit subdued, but I’m doing a lot of things when you’re not looking.” And, he also told us that “I’m playing a bass melody in these happy songs”, and so, at the core, techniques that he alone is capable of employing are given full life in this new creation. As pertains to the album’s creation, we wonder what he confronted with his instrument, what music he constructed. These questions we shall earnestly pursue.

INTERVIEW – BEGIN

– The new album KISS has just been released, but could you tell how long ago you began working on it?
[For the music itself, I think each of us members had some in our respective stocks, but we got together and showed them to each other in January of this year.

– Then, you would have started writing songs after last year’s 15th L’Anniversary Live at Tokyo Dome on November 25th and 26th?
[On the band’s schedule, we had set December 2006 and January 2007 aside as songwriting time, so that’s when each of us had scheduled time to write some songs.]

– In March of this year, you released the single Can’t stop believing under your solo name of tetsu. Were both things in progress at the same time?
[Well, I was doing them side by side, so you could say they were in progress together…]

– Now, how did you switch gears, mentally speaking, between making music for L’Arc~en~Ciel and making music for your solo project?
[I did my solo recording in December and January too… but for my solo work, it’s not like I wrote a new song from scratch right then and there, I already had a fully built-up demo to work from, so all I needed to do was get it properly recorded, or just make a clean copy, basically. Then, I started from scratch writing my songs for L’Arc~en~Ciel, which I do in a completely different frame of mind. The way I think changes, and so on. So, it doesn’t feel like I was really working on both things at the same time to me, and I didn’t feel like I had to work at separating them mentally, either.]

– I see. How do you feel about the way your bass playing turned out on the new album?
[There are some songs worth copying, and there are some very difficult songs in there, too. Pretty girl is a hard song. So is Umibe… Oh, and Hurry Xmas is hard, too. In these songs, it wasn’t just about fingering, I had to actually memorize bits, it was hard to play them without making mistakes (laughs).]

– It seems like you’re always working quite hard.
[Yeah. So once I mess up I can’t go back (laughs). In recordings, too, I follow my sheet music and end up going “Woah~ Where am I again?!”, getting totally lost. It might be hard to pick up on, but in parts of Pretty girl I’m moving quite a lot. What else now… Yuki no Ashiato is hard too, with those pauses.]

– Indeed, sound division and pauses aren’t easy to mark on sheet music, yet they’re important points to keep in mind.
[Well… I’m really not that good at taking pauses (laughs). I can’t just stop and wait, I always to keep right on playing the next bit (laughs).]

– Link -KISS Mix- is a song you wrote yourself, right, tetsu-san. It’s up-tempo and cheerful. I think it has the pattern you already specialize in….
[No, that’s a difficult song, the bass line moves quite a bit, and there’s part one, part two, part three, each part’s bass line moves in a different way. Um…… I guess this time around, the bass lines seem simple, at first, they don’t sound all that difficult, but if you try to copy them I think you’ll find that there are a lot of hard songs on here.]

– Which songs do you have in mind when you say they sound simple?
[I mean like, it’s probably just that our older songs were more obvious and flashy. For example… if they were food, they’d be hamburgers and curry (laughs).]

– (laughs) Or fried shrimp!
[Yeah, and spaghetti! You know what I mean, they had that easy-to-understand feel to them, I think. Also, our band sound, the balance was set so that the drums would be quieter and the bass would be louder, but now we’ve gone normal (laughs) and the balance changed, the bass sounds more restrained than it used to. Another thing is that I used to play a lot of things in high positions, but now I’m doing more with low sounds, so I think that the showiness doesn’t jump out and grab you as much… Well I guess I’m just playing like an adult.]

– Like an adult… Thanks to that, even if you aren’t showing off, you make your music dance, it’s as if you’ve reached your ultimate form…
[Nah, it’s not like I’ve reached the castle or anything like that. But I do think I’m getting wiser, and growing up, little by little.]

***

– As of this album, you’ve shifted from using four-stringed basses to using five-stringed ones. I think this makes for a major topic. Why the switch?
[I used five-string basses way back on the first album, DUNE, and the second one, Tierra, so it’s not like I’d never used them before, but the fundamental change where I switched completely over to only using five-string basses happened in April 2006, when I participated in Creature Creature, MORRIE-san’s solo project, as bassist. For that project, the guitarist Minoru-kun had composed songs with a seven-string guitar and he was playing them on one, too, so to match it I naturally used five-string basses. On the Creature Creature album, Light&Lust, I play the bass on nine of the ten songs, and for all those recordings I used only five-string basses. After doing that, it’s like I can’t go back anymore.]

– The nuances must be different, between a down-tuned four-string and a five-string bass, right?
[I’ve used down-tuned four-strings before, but when I’m holding one of those it messes up my head. To make the switch easier I just use a five-string bass.]

– Are there any tricky aspects to using a five-string?
[No, I have used five-string basses before, so it’s not something I just recently learned how to play. There are some old songs of ours that I recorded with a five-string, and if you look at the video of our first live at Budoukan, I’m using a five-string fretless bass there… On the album ark, I played Shinjitsu to Gensou to with a five-string. There’s also the tour, 1999 GRAND CROSS TOUR, I used one then too, so it’s really not a new thing for me at all. My fans have known it for a long time, oh and for my solo song Shinkirou I played a five-string bass too.]

– I see. Then, does making five-string basses your main instrument affect your methods when writing songs or constructing basslines?
[No, it really doesn’t. If you were to write a song starting with the riffs, then it would affect things because a five-string gives deeper sound, but since I write starting with the melody, it really doesn’t influence my songs much at all.]

– Do you think changing your type of instrument affects your actual style of play?
[Even though I didn’t use the lower end of the register, I still need to change my fingering. To bring the five strings to life, I need to move differently, and to be honest it makes fingering a lot more fun, this way.]

– It’s the way the 4th string’s 2f was too far, but you can play it when it becomes the 5th string’s 7f, right?
[Yeah. I think of the phrase first with a four-string, then when I transfer it over to a five-string that phrase is going to change, so my playing changes with it, and it’s not like I changed it in the middle of composing the song, it’s like I’ve always had the five-string version, naturally.]

– I see. Have you ever had any problems with the tune being too low, so that you couldn’t hear the vocals clearly anymore?
[Hmmm, I think I’ve already gotten used to it. It might have been harder to pick sounds out, before, but that’s really just a question of “adjusting”. About my five-string basses on this album, I almost used nothing but my ZON Legacy ELITE 519, it’s actually my first time using just one thing for most of an entire album that way.]

– You didn’t need to adjust much, then.
[That’s right. But for making the right sound, I went through a lot of amp heads, though.]

– Also, speaking of your five-string basses, for lives in the past, you’ve used your ESP BARDIC, which is actually a tetsu model, right? When getting your own model made, what kind of requests do you make, and what sort of exchanges do you have with the makers?
[The BARDIC got made some time last year, but for requests…. I designed everything myself. That’s why I charted everything and drew them a map. Sound-wise…. The body and neck are the same as the BUZZ BASS I’ve used for a while now, and for the pickups I just went through a lot of different ones and tried them all out. I had them changed three times, and with these Seymour Duncan ones I can finally relax.]

– How did you get the idea to use a humbucker for the rear pickup and a single coil for the front pickup?
[About the rear pickup, actually I tap it, so I only use it like a single coil anyway… It’s just that, the reason is that when you mount a single coil for the rear pickup, it affects the sound.]

– With this combination, in a way it’s as if you had three coils lined up, but were tapping one of them.
[Going on my experience, I’d say having three pickups never works out well. A long time ago, I had three pickups on my model ESP BASS IV, but in the end I had it changed so there would only be two.]

– When dealing with this sort of equipment, tetsu-san, do you take pains to go over everything carefully?
[When I’m making my own models, I go over the details with them every time. About the latest BARDIC I used for the tour “Are you ready? 2007 Light my Fire Again”, I’ve had the bridge changed. It was a Hipshot before, but I had it changed to a Gotoh. It reconfirmed for me the way that changing the bridge can change completely change the sound. Back to my current stuff, I think this bass sounds great. I’ve used a ZON in recordings for a long time, but now I’ve added this five-string ZON to my repertoire. With five-stringers, the balance of each string can get pretty bad, you know? The fifth string can sound completely out there, or it might sound like it belongs elsewhere. But with a ZON, any string you play has just the right volume, the balance is incredible, the sounds are tight and low just like they should be, and it’s a low sound you can pick out. Oh, this time around I changed my speaker cabinet to a Basson. Especially since I’ve gone five-stringed, the Basson sounds excellent.]

– Since the “15th L’Anniversary Live” it’s been seen with you on stage. It has an impact, looks-wise.
[Because it’s so big, right. But, more than that big, 8-speaker cabinet (B810B EarthQuake), I prefer the one I have with four, 10-inch speakers and twitter built in (B410B). I have both, but I think the 4×10 suits me better. This year for the “Are you ready? 2007 Light my Fire Again” tour, I had two of the 8-speaker ones lined up plus a 4×10 hooked up in the back with a mic.]

***

— Each of us members goes around thinking “Let’s make some good music”, but we have no way of knowing how it will be received out in the world. If there’s as much as one single person who can share our feelings, then that a good thing, but of course there must also be a lot of people who don’t like it, then. —

– By the way, given that all the members are able to compose songs, I imagine that it must be difficult to balance each person’s demands when you are constructing music together. What’s your secret?
[Ummm, there is no secret, probably… …we each have a different approach to writing music, each person, each group must have their own too, and even in one group the same methods don’t get used for every song. It’s probably the fact that we’ve been together for over a decade, so we’ve found the best ways to go about it and we know what works.]

– How does the song writer manage to take initiative?
[Let me see. We all have our own ideas, so we throw them around, we express our opinions as things come up, adding things, removing things, until it’s in the best shape it can be and we’re all satisfied with it, whether it’s an actual recording or just pre-pro…]

– Speaking of the bass melody on this album, I can hear the high degree of movement in the phrasing, but I’d like to ask how you strike a balance between making the bassline move, bringing the song to life, and adapting the band ensemble?
[Hmm… The first thing is getting the song to stand up on its own, but I think that’s obvious… Above all, the guiding principle is that we need to see if the song has a melody that can stand alone. The most important songs need to have a solid melody, I’ve always thought that it was important to check whether a melody is worth working out arrangements for or not. Putting that first, next comes the whole ensemble, the rhythm pattern, the tone quality and all the instruments. As a result, if it sounds like something’s lacking afterwards, I adjust my bass part and move around until it gets better, and sometimes the opposite happens and I need to move a bit less… In recordings, unlike lives, we can do it over and over again, record and listen, try things out, listen to what we’ve got so far, in any case we can go until we’ve got the best result possible, so we can try out all our ideas. I think the basic thing is to have a choice of good ideas.]

– In other words, it’s by trial and error.
[Well, as each member records more and more tries, we can go back and change the arrangement a bit. That happens a lot.]

***

– In old Japanese pop… In rock as well, when listening to the most popular songs, there’s the singing of course, but the bass playing also steals attention. The bass playing moves, alongside the singing that it helps bring to life, and in a sense, I believe this to be ideal. Listening to the many songs you’ve played, tetsu-san, I think this certainly applies to L’Arc~en~Ciel.
[Old pop and famous songs, well of course there’s a lot of great stuff there, it was well thought out when it was made, a lot of theory went into it, it was all made according to calculations, so of course it’s high-quality.]

– There are links between eras, sometimes as a song that becomes popular enough to still be popular years later. I think that the way L’Arc~en~Ciel is going, you’re right in the middle of everything, this era. How does it feel for you?
[Ummm… Well, right now, I think we’re different from the music that’s popular around the world.]

– But, in the grand scheme of the era, some of your melodies are universally known…
[No, because stuff with no melody whatsoever is very popular. Hiphop is that way, for example, and even hard rock can get that way too. There are songs where the melody is forgotten and all they think about are guitar riffs.]

– That included, what do you see as your position in the grand scheme of things?
[(strained laugh)…That’s a hard one. Honestly, I don’t know what the popular things of the world or of the era actually are. Each of us members goes around thinking “let’s make good music, let’s make good music” so we make the kind of music that we like, but we have no way of knowing how it will be received out in the world. If there’s as much as one single person who can share our feelings, then that a good thing, but of course there must also be a lot of people who don’t like it, then.]

– Then, do you try to move the hearts of those people who don’t like your music?
[I think there are many kinds of people among the “people who don’t like us”. For example, I think every person has their own tastes, so if you asked people what they like, asked them to name artists and songs they like, and if we heard that music and thought it was “good”, then we could get closer to that person… Nah, it wouldn’t get us any closer. If we heard what that person’s tastes and interests were, if we could go “Ah, I get it!” then as people who get it, we could go “let’s try to do things this way” or ask “What can we do to become a little more like this?” and so that’s how we’d probably think…]

– You don’t need to get closer to them?
[For example, if we were to take someone who thinks “L’Arc~en~Ciel totally sucks, their songs are no good”, and ask that person “So what kind of music do you like, then?” we could hear their answer. Then we might listen to that music and see if we get it or not. Then we might go “Ah, it’s actually this kind of music that sucks, not us” (laughs), so we don’t need to get close to that person. It’s like “Go ahead, say whatever you want.”]

Translated by Natalie Arnold