I was reading through some old Guitar World magazines the other day and found an article/interviews with Trent Reznor, following the release of the Fragile. Here is a brief excerpt.

Plugging into Trent Reznor's Digital World
Excerpt from Guitar World
June 2000
By Alan di Perna

"The training I've had on piano sometimes gets in the way," Trent Reznor muses. "On guitar, I don't have that problem, 'cause I suck."

Whatever Reznor lacks in technical facility he more than makes up for in the way of sheer creativity. In recording The Fragile, he plugged his guitar into the vast technological resources of Nothing Studios and used the whole damn place as his stomp box.

"The first question was always, 'Do we want it to sound like a guitar or something else?'" he says. Either way, Reznor and co-producer Alan Moulder would generally start by plugging a guitar into a row of effects pedals gleaned from Reznor's impressive collection. Favourites included a Swollen Pickle by Way Huge Electronics and, on the vintage front, a Univox Uni-Fuzz, Fender Blender, Foxx Tone Machine, an original DigiTech Whammy Pedal and a mysterious Trent bought for 20 dollars in an L.A. keyboard shop. There's no brand name or model number on it. Just the words "tone control," and knobs for lo, hi, mid and a sweepable resonance filter. "It's the most brutal kind of eq, but with intense distortion," Trent marvels.

Whereas Reznor has almost always recorded guitars direct in the past, he did go for some miked cabinet sounds this time, at Moulder's encouragement. On the direct front, Reznor generally used Amp Farm (an amp-modeling plug-in card for Pro Tools) or a Zoom speaker simulator. A DigiTech 2120 was also in favour for a while. Typically Reznor would record multiple takes of any given guitar track into Pro Tools, often working in loop recording mode. He generally sat at the control room console playing guitar while Alan Moulder manipulated effects controls in real time and programmer Keith Hillibrandt wrote down the bar numbers where things started sounding cool. The multiple guitar takes were then layered up using Pro-Tools' cut-and-paste facilities. That, for example, is how the distressed power chording on "The Day the World Went Away" was achieved.

Many guitar tracks went through another processing stage after being recorded and layered. For this Reznor often used devices like Virus, by Music Access Electronics," and the Mutronics Mutator, both of which allow any audio signal to be passed through a bank of analog synth-style filters. The one-note drone heard in the verses to "the Day the World Went Away" sounds like an analog synth with bad case of oscillator drift. But it's actually layered guitars processed through the Mutator. An old Roland Chorus Echo with a broken motor was another prime source of strange, wobbly tones.

"I'd say 80 percent of the guitar parts on the record were done with a Parker guitar," Reznor adds. "I used the piezo pickup on the Parker quite a bit. One of the tricks we'd use on this record was tuning all the guitar strings to the same pitch: two low octave, two middle and two high. Then I'd strum as fast as I could, playing a melody with one finger up and down the neck. We'd run that through a [Yamaha] SPX1000 with early reflection reverb on. You're not hearing the strings, but you're hearing the pitch, and it has an infinite reverb type sound, but it's not sustaining like a room reverb."

The job of recreating all this madness on the concert stage fell to longtime Reznor cohorts Robin Finck and Danny Lohner. "Danny and I will go through the 25 guitar tracks on the record and break it down to the most essential parts," says Finck, who has been using an assortment of Godin guitars on the Fragility tour, employing their piezo pickups to reproduce some of Reznor's Parker ones. For meatier stuff, Finck plays a Les Paul. He's using a Marshall JMP-1 preamp and a Bradshaw switching system with a TC Electronic G-Force and a Voodoo Valve as featured effects.

Danny Lohner, who also contributed some guitar tracks to the album, plays both bass and guitar live, performing on Fernandes and PRS guitars and an Ernie Ball Music Man bass through a SansAmp PSA-1. His guitar rig includes a DigiTech 2120 and Whammy Wah and a Piercing Moose octave distortion pedal by Way Huge Electronics. A Ground Control MIDI Switcher keeps all this in order.

Onstage, Reznor chimes in on Gibson Les Paul Standard and ESP Les Paul models through a Line 6 Pod. All guitars are direct-injected into the house P.A. - a necessity given Nine Inch Nails' ultra-violent stage show. "We used to have mikes in cabinets," says Lohner. "But they'd get kicked around and you'd go two songs not knowing your guitar wasn't being heard in the house."

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