When you take a song like Master of Puppets, and isolate the harmony and melody, you see how great these composers are and why they were so successful.”
Wikimetal (Daniel Dystyler): Hey guys. We're starting another episode of Wikimetal. It's me, Daniel Dystyler, and Rafael Masini here next to me. Hey Rafinha, how's it going?
Wikimetal (Rafael Masini): How are you?
W (DD): Another week with another program, this time very interesting because we have illustrious guests here, a group of people who do a really, really cool job! It's a somewhat different kind of work; some of the sounds we're going to hear today will border on Heavy Metal, others are quite different, but I think it's work that needs to be publicized because it's very different from what we've seen before, and we'll talk a little about that throughout the program, right Rafael?
W (RM): Yes. We listened to the music together, and two excellent musicians who actually brought some influence from the viola to Heavy Metal, from Heavy Metal to the viola. In fact, they're going to tell us about it.
W (DD): We're here with Ricardo Vignini and Zé Helder, who put together a project called "Rock Fashion, Extreme Guitar". Welcome, thank you so much for participating here at Wikimetal, it's an honor for us to be with you here.
Viola Extrema (Zé Helder): Thank you, folks.
Extreme Viola (Ricardo Vignini): Thank you for the space. I find this Heavy Metal thing interesting because I've been saying that I think the Heavy Metal audience is very similar to the audience of traditional Brazilian folk music, which is a loyal audience, consumers of their art, followers of that. There are radicalisms in both areas too, and not so much in the mainstream media. The first music I had access to in my life, Ricardo Vignini is speaking, was Heavy Metal. I remember when I heard Master Of Puppets for the first time I said, "That's what I want to do with my life," I just didn't know I would become a folk musician playing that.
W (DD): You managed it, right?
VE (RV): I did it, I did it. And I followed this whole scene, my brother was already working with one of the pioneering Heavy Metal bands here in Brazil, which was Vírus, my brother worked as a roadie back then.
W (DD): That's awesome, you were at SP Metal, right?
VE (RV): That's right, when I was a kid I used to go see those guys rehearse. I remember seeing Sepultura perform at Aeroviários, at the airport workers' union.
W (DD): In front of Congonhas, right? The airport. Viper played there.
VE (RV): I saw that whole Heavy Metal scene happen back then, and I remember that to fill a show all you needed was a Xerox poster at the Galeria do Rock, and the crowd would be there.
W (DD): Lambe-lambe on a pole.
VE (RV): I think it's interesting. Andreas Kisser said something about our album that I thought was cool. He said that when we recorded Sepultura's "Kaiovas," it was a song influenced by the viola, and that today Metal influences the viola. I believe so. There are some things I find about the viola caipira that are more similar to the guitar than the acoustic guitar itself. It's a very rhythmic instrument, and it's an instrument that's growing in Brazil and that you can play everything with.
W (DD): And to pick up on what you're saying, so our audience can understand a little better, our two illustrious interviewees recorded a CD called "Rock Fashion, Extreme Viola" which has a lot of hits, traditional Heavy Metal anthems recorded in a completely different version, arranged for viola. And about what you're talking about, that the viola has things similar to the guitar, I was listening to, I think it was in "Aces High" which even has the solo you guys do, and you can see the bends that are used on the guitar and what you do on the viola to get a sound, not the same, but reminiscent of, I don't know… what Adrian Smith is doing at that moment in Iron Maiden.
VE (ZH): The cool thing is that while it's similar, we're using traditional viola music rhythms and viola technique. So the viola has a very rich rhythmic aspect, like the viola pagode, the batuque, the cururu, the cateretê. There are a lot of right-hand strumming patterns that, when we put them into a Heavy Metal song, worked well, became fun, and ended up complementing the rhythm of two violas, serving to express that music as well as the guitar and all the heaviness. The melody was sometimes more emphasized.
W (RM): And let me tell you something, since you said that there's a way of playing, a rhythm specific to the viola. I can say something silly, okay, and then you guys can help me out. One day a friend of mine said, "Dude, you should play the viola because it's an instrument that's in tune just by strumming it," and I said, "Oh, that's great, lend me your viola," I said, "Let me search the internet to see if I can play something because I think the timbre is very beautiful." Then that thing started, "What tuning do you want? Downriver, upriver?" And I gave up. I said, "Wait a minute, I don't even know where to start." And then yesterday, Dany mentioned the Iron Maiden song and I was like, "I want to see the middle part, I want to see the middle part," which was really, really cool, and I started thinking: did you use any traditional tuning or did you have to create a tuning to play these songs?
VE (ZH): It must be a traditional tuning, we use a "cebolão" tuning which is the most common tuning here in the Midwest. Tuning is very much linked to regions of Brazil, and it's cool that I'm also a viola teacher.
W (DD): By the way, they both have a fantastic musical pedigree, right?
VE (ZH): We both teach viola. And the cool thing is that when you're going to teach, I always tell the beginner on the viola, "Dude, it's the only instrument that has a name for tuning, a name for rhythm, you know?" This kind of thing is its own universe, a fascinating instrument, very connected to Brazilian culture.
VE (RV): There's something really interesting: when you take a song, for example, Master Of Puppets, and you isolate the harmony and melody, you see how great these composers are and why they were so successful. So, you bring together all these kids from rock and heavy metal, but there's also something interesting: the audience that likes viola, when they listen to this, it sounds like beautiful instrumental viola music to them; they don't even think that it was rock at some point, you know? So you break down all that by showing how interesting the harmonic and melodic structure of these guys is, right?
W (DD): That's really cool. In our program, besides the chat, we're going to listen to some music, and I wanted to ask Ricardo a question first, and then I'll ask Zé Helder. Imagine you have an MP3 player with shuffle and about a hundred songs from those Heavy Metal eras. What song, when it suddenly came on, you accidentally turned on the radio, or for some reason you heard it, and you said, "I can't help but nod my head to this song, this song has so much energy, and I want to listen to it now, it's a song that really..."
W (RM): The kind you can look at and think, "That's the next one I'm going to play on the guitar"?
VE (RV): Wow… It’s “The Music”. Music is very complicated, isn’t it?
W (DD): I know there are about a hundred you wanted to say. Say the first one that comes to mind.
VE (RV): Perhaps Kashmir itself, a song that greatly marked my life, and Jimmy Page marked it a lot because it was through Jimmy Page that I discovered what open tuning was. I had access to that music before I had access to viola music, right? So perhaps I can talk about Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, like other Led Zeppelin songs, or I can also talk about Metallica. I saw Metallica here for the first time when they came to Brazil.
W (RM): In Ibirapuera Park. Not in the park, in the Ibirapuera Gymnasium.
VE (RV): It's in the gym, in the gym.
W (DD): On the '…And Justice For All' tour.
VE (RV): So I can say something from there, but it's very large.
W (DD): Let's listen to Kashmir, it's an excellent choice. Okay? Kashmir!
Andreas Kisser told us that Kaiowas was a song influenced by the viola, and that today Metal influences the viola
W (DD): So this was Kashmir, the original by Led Zeppelin, and anyone who wants to check out the version by Matuto Moderno can listen to the songs on the website, which has all the tracks available. And like all the bands we've featured here on Wikimetal, we strongly recommend that people buy the CD, support the bands, buy t-shirts, go to the shows, and show their support because that's how we ensure that these people whose work we truly admire continue to be active. Your album, we're here with Ricardo Vignini and Zé Helder from Matuto Moderno, they released the album "Moda de Rock, Viola Extrema," and it's really cool because they made a selection that, if I were to make my own playlist, I think these songs would be on it: Master by Metallica, Aces High by Iron Maiden, Mr. Crowley by Ozzy Osbourne, Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, Hangar 18 by Megadeth, which is a killer song! Sepultura, which you already mentioned (Kaiowas), Nirvana, and then there are more rock 'n' roll things like the Beatles, which I think is Norwegian Wood, which you guys picked, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix. So it's a real feast, but in a completely different style, with a very cool arrangement for viola, very nice. I wanted you to talk a little about the following, you mentioned it a bit Ricardo at the beginning and we were chatting off-air, and I'd like you to add to it, we understand that what you're doing is a kind of paradigm shift, that you're really crossing a boundary from one style to another, and we think the styles have similarities and this work you're doing is very cool. I wanted to ask you if, despite this paradigm shift that's shattering prejudices—showing that rural culture isn't lesser, poorer, or dumber than any other, and that Heavy Metal isn't either—if you still experience any kind of prejudice like, "Hey... but you're putting Heavy Metal in this," or from a metalhead's point of view, someone saying, "Are you listening to country guitar now?" How do you see this issue of prejudice in what you're doing, which is a kind of walking on a razor's edge, breaking paradigms?
VE (ZH): Oh man… That's one of the things, I think it's one of the most interesting things. If there's one thing that I think has great value in this album, this work that we did, it's this paradigm shift. I think we're actually shortening a path that we've already lived, right? We've already gone through Metal, discovered the viola and so on, and if you look at the origin of rock, it's in the blues, which is American rural music, and everyone is crazy about American rural music and doesn't know Brazilian rural music, which is… the guys are the same, the lifestyle is the same, the music is the same.
VE (RV): Tuning.
VE (ZH): The tuning is the same as for country music, from blues. I think Ricardo could even talk about this because he had an interesting experience with some American bluesmen, Bob Brozman and…
VE (RV): And Woody Mann, they're people who have the blues, because, well… The blues, when you start listening to Metallica, which was my case, you say, “What does the guy from Metallica listen to?”, “Oh, the guy from Metallica listens to Sabbath.” “What does the guy from Sabbath listen to?” You'll end up in country music. And why can't our rock have that influence from our country music, right? I also think that what led me to this universe of country music is because I was fed up with the rock industry, which became too square, it became something that was too square, too neat, too perfect. I remember that to get a guitar sound like you got from Metallica back then, wow… there were no pedals in Brazil, nothing. You had to mix one sound from the pedal with another… that kind of thing. Nowadays it's become a video game preset, right? And I think this video game thing is cool too because a lot of kids are discovering cool sounds through video games. But it no longer has that rebellious aspect, that thing about rebellion… I think it's been somewhat lost. So I was kind of turned off by rock at the time because of that, and that's where I fell in love with this viola system. There are some viola players we hung out with, like Índio Cachoeira and Helena Meireles, who are pure rock 'n' roll.
W (DD): They're Metal, right?
VE (ZH): Soliveira.
VE (RV): Soliveira, Ducati. You see a dotted Ducati. The letters, man, the letters of Tião Carreiro, which were originally by Dorival dos Santos, are heavy metal letters. They're quite interesting.
W (DD): That's really cool. I saw your album and it was mastered at Abbey Road, right? Did you have any contact with that? What was that experience like?
VE (RV): Look… You could do this kind of work in Brazil today because there are a lot of good people who do it, but we wanted to capture a little bit of that spirit. See if something would resonate with us, and the fact that it was a record of country guitar playing rock n' roll… it made sense. And then, “Wow, let's do it there,” and we were very happy with the result, and this virtual thing on the internet today helps us do this in a way that isn't so expensive. So it was really cool.
W (DD): Cool. In your shuffles, Helder, what song drops that makes you say, "Damn... I'm back to my metalhead days, I needed to headbang here"?
VE (ZH): Dude, I think I'll even answer your question in a different way, because when you mentioned it, I immediately thought of a lot of Led Zeppelin music, right? Which is something I've listened to a lot, but Led Zeppelin's music is very adaptable, you know? Those mandolins, and those twelve-string guitars, all that stuff, and you can do it with anything you can think of, right? But I think what was most challenging to do on this album was Hangar 18, the Metallica song, which has an interesting rhythmic break at the beginning where the melody is played over a totally broken rhythmic groove that I had to adapt a broken viola pagode rhythm on top of, which isn't the proper pagode. I think those were the most interesting to do, the most challenging, the most complicated.
W (DD): And which one do you want to listen to now? Which one should we listen to, Hangar 18 or…?
VE (ZH): I think Hangar 18.
W (DD): That was Hangar 18, really cool. And you mentioned the neighborhood at the beginning of Master, and I have a band that we just mess around in, some friends we get together to play and we do a little show once a year, and this year we decided to do a kind of Metallica Tribute. So we only played Metallica. And Master was the most challenging for us, so we said, "Let's learn Master at the next rehearsal?", "Let's go." So everyone learned the song, came to the next rehearsal and said, "Let's try and see how far we go, right?" Okay… One, two, three, four… Ta-da!
VE (ZH): Only the first part.
W (RM): This happened in your little YouTube video too, didn't it? You're going to start with Master and get confused, right?
VE (RV): Yes. The first version of it. The first version that was recorded is kind of messy because of those videos… We started this work kind of as a joke. We had two clear objectives. First, it was to canonize our students, and second, it was for our own enjoyment. So at the beginning, we didn't take these arrangements very seriously. “Oh… let's do it.” And when it came time to record, it became more serious, the joke became serious. So at the beginning, we weren't so concerned with the overall execution; it was more for fun.
W (DD): Cool. And do you see any continuity in mixing it with Heavy Metal going forward? What do you see for the future?
VE (RV): Since this is generating so much buzz, I think that in a while a volume two of this story might come out. And because you could make a whole album just about Metallica, you could make a whole album just about Iron Maiden, you could make a whole album just about Led Zeppelin, you could make a whole album just about the Beatles.
W (DD): Which is somewhat in line with Apocalyptica, who also did something similar, they made a mixed album and then did tributes. A completely different idea from yours, but also transgressing between classic and Metal.
VE (ZH): There's something. The guy who gave us the name for the album, a journalist who recently passed away, Toninho Spessoto, someone we're very grateful to, said, he was super involved with music and all that, and he even told us: "This work will boost the other things you do." And it draws attention to the rest, because the work with Matuto Moderno was actually always what we did, but it was original work.
W (DD): And for sure, that's something that will draw attention. People are already going to your website, listening on Wikimetal, checking out your other CDs and everything else. That's really cool.
Which song do you think was the most challenging on the album, the most difficult both in terms of arrangement and actually playing it?
VE (RV): In my case, I think it was Mr. Crowley.
W (DD): Mr. Crowley?
VE (RV): Yeah. Because that Randy Rhoads solo is already awesome for a guitarist.
W (RM): I already found the introduction difficult. When I said, "Damn, they put an introduction in it?"
VE (RV): The introduction is more guitar-oriented, right? But that solo… Because, when we started making this album, we first went after the authorizations so we wouldn't have that frustration of doing a thousand hours of study and then not being able to record. And when all the authorizations arrived, we said, “My God, what have I done wrong?”
"What Heavy Metal has done influences every song on Earth today."
W (DD): It would be nice to block Mr. Crowley, wouldn't it?
VE (RV): I could have passed and picked an easier one, right? But it happened, and it required a few weeks of hard work to nail that solo. And Hangar 18 was difficult too.
VE (ZH): I think another song that was difficult, because Mr. Crowley was difficult for Ricardo because of the solo, because my part is more relaxed in that song, but Aqualung is also a brilliant song, and when we play it, we realize how brilliant it is. The whole thing is atonal.
VE (RV): The harmony is very sophisticated.
VE (ZH): It's a very sophisticated business.
W (DD): Jethro Tull has a lot of these, right?
VE (RV): One thing we also questioned when we were recording Aqualung was, "Wow, Aqualung was a huge success. It became a worldwide hit for music, and how many minutes is the original version? Seven minutes?" I don't know, back then, a guy would make a highly sophisticated seven-minute song and it would play on every radio station…
W (DD): And it would become a hit, right?
VE (RV): And it became a hit.
W (RM): And it's still playing today, right?
VE (RV): Yes. But at the time it became pop. It played all over the world, a highly sophisticated piece of music that only gained popularity because of its musical quality, so I think it was a time when, despite the existence of payola, which is deeply ingrained, things were sustained by musical quality. That's an interesting thing.
W (RM): And since they both have this Heavy Metal background…
VE (ZH): Or present, right?
W (RM): Or present… How did you arrive at this repertoire?
W (DD): Where did the choice of songs come from?
W (RM): Because I have the impression that creating a setlist makes you want to fight over so many good songs.
W (RM): It's really difficult, but I think the ones that we managed to make more guitar-like prevailed. But like I told you, you can keep that Metallica sound... It's impressive how Metallica works in this story. You can play several Metallica songs. And what Heavy Metal did influences any music on Earth today, I think. The style that was created, those heavy guitars, nowadays you even see it in advertising, you even see it in a certain singer... and that thing appears, you know? And it was cool for us. I even think that how much I played this style helped me in the rest of the things I developed in my life. Iron Maiden too. Wow, the Iron Maiden cover... then I listened to other Iron Maiden songs and said, "Wow... you can have this one, you can have that one...". I think it will take more work to do the next one.
W (RM): It's going to happen. It's going to happen.
W (DD): Besides, the bar is way up there now.
VE (ZH): That question reminded me of something else. There was the Jimi Hendrix song we did, "May This Be Love"... When we were choosing Jimi Hendrix's work, there were dozens of cool things, but would you listen to Jimi sing, man? There are times when he almost speaks. That melody is kind of... you know? It doesn't have that very well-defined note. It's that totally blue note thing, all very black music. It was very difficult to make it sound like Jimi Hendrix, you know? To convince people. So we came to this song and said, "Look, this one has a pretty cool melody and all that..."
VE (RV): And Jimi Hendrix also has something interesting, like… Wow, I'm left-handed and I play Hendrix, I don't know… I've been watching Hendrix play for twenty years, and I always played for fun, and when the time comes to record a Hendrix song, damn… that's a big responsibility, right?
W (DD): It's one thing to joke around, right?
VE (RV): It's one thing to joke around... I hope that wherever he is, he doesn't pull my leg.
W (DD): I think in one of the videos on YouTube, you say, "The guy plays everything wrong," "He plays wrong, right?", that he's playing with the wrong hand...
VE (ZH): With the wrong hand.
W (RM): And there's the thing that you guys still play the melody of the voice, right? So there's all of that.
VE (RV): Yeah, there are things like that, for example, in Aces High, usually those guitar duets, it's two guitars playing the fifth. In our case, one of us ends up doing both duets, playing both parts, and the other has to do the rhythm guitar, the vocals, the drums, the bass, and all that stuff. It involves all that work.
W (DD): That's really cool. Thank you so much for being here at Wikimetal, it was truly an honor to have you, very nice.
VE (ZH): An honor for us as well.
VE (RV): Thank you guys. I hope you reap many rewards from this, and manage to record a lot of things, and spread the word to the kids... Kids and not-so-kids alike, because Heavy Metal is an interesting thing, it's music as serious as any other.
W (DD): Great. Thank you very much, and anyone listening to the program can contact us through our website www.wikimetal.com.br, through our Twitter @wikimetal, Facebook, etc... you know all the ways. Very cool, and to finish, Master, right?
VE (ZH): Oh, maybe. Great.
W (DD): Ricardo and Zé Helder, thank you very much. Master Of Puppets
VE (RV): Thanks.
W (RM): Thank you.
