Linkin Park’s Brad Delson: How I Approached the Guitars on New Linkin Park Album

UG exclusive: “You have a vocal you love and you want the guitar to support the vocal.”

Guitarist Brad Delson discussed his approach to guitars on Linkin Park’s upcoming studio album “One More Light,” explaining to UG interviewer Steven Rosen:

“While certainly the guitars on [2014’s] ‘The Hunting Party‘ played a different role than they do on ‘One More Light,’ I put as much love into the guitar work on this album as any other album.

“The guitar on this album is much more tender though and subtle and supportive of the vocals. So there may be tons of layers of guitar but you’re just not gonna hear it necessarily jump out in the foreground and scream your name.

“In most cases on this record, which is the opposite predicament for us, the vocals were finished and we had a layer of maybe a couple key sounds from when we wrote. We added all the sounds to complement the vocals.

“And that’s also why I said in terms of the guitar work, a lot of it is obviously implemented to complement the vocals. You have a vocal you love and you want the guitar to support the vocal.

“That doesn’t mean the guitar is an afterthought. That just means the guitar has to have a sound in a complementary role to what Chester and Mike are doing or otherwise it’s going to get in the way.”

Asked to discuss the acoustic guitars on the “Sharp Edges” track, Brad replied:

“Our engineer Ethan Mates has this beautiful acoustic guitar and I don’t even know the make. It was just a one-of-a-kind guitar and in fact one of our collaborators, a very talented songwriter and producer named Eg White [Adele, Florence and the Machine, Sam Smith and more], fell in love with this guitar.

“He’s from England and he was over here just to hang with us and work. He found what he thought was an identical guitar somewhere in Riverside [a city about 90 miles outside of Los Angeles]. He drove quite a distance to get this guitar, which he was so excited to play. He brought it back to the studio only to find that it sounded nothing like the one I had. [Laughs]”

“I think he tried rubbing food and all kinds of strange concoctions onto the guitar to try to get it to sound like the one I would play every day. So I would always have that guitar in my hand when we were writing.

“I would just go to my natural rhythmic kind of strumming patterns. Some of them on ‘Sharp Edges’ and I’m pretty sure what you’re hearing was just me naturally playing along to the melody as we were writing. Obviously adding layers and fucking with it over time but the core of that is the actual burst of inspiration with the song.”

Asked about the “Sorry Now” track, the guitarist noted:

“The way we executed the guitar treatment on that as almost part of the backdrop but it’s still really heavy. Yeah, the presentation of that is certainly different than anything we’ve done. It goes back to that goal of no genre where we wanna be able to mix our influences and do something that is not derivative but rather something special or uniquely our own and that was a really fun one to work on.”

Asked whether “other players come to mind” when layering guitars, Brad replied:

“Yeah, I think about among a lot of great influences, the ones that come to mind are Metallica, The Cure, Radiohead, Led Zeppelin and my list goes on and on. I’m also inspired by music that isn’t necessarily guitar-driven and finding a way to channel that energy with guitar.”

Focusing on guitar solos in general, Delson said:

“I would think, ‘How do I complement what my bandmates are doing? What does the song wanna be?’ It’s really finding the song. I think ‘The Hunting Party’ had a guitar solo on every song but that’s ’cause those songs wanted that and that was the personality of those songs.

“So I just try to follow where the song wants to go or help see the song through and certainly not get in the way of my talented bandmates and complement what they’re doing.”

“One More Light” is due out on May 19 via Warner Bros as the band’s seventh studio album. You can check out the latest single “Invisible” below.