Troy Sanders On Carving Mastodon's Latest Slab Of Prog-Metal

WITH HIS ELECTRIFIED MOP OF HAIR AND WARM DISPOSITION, Troy Sanders could easily be taken for a giant, affable sort of heavy-metal muppet. Sitting down for a chat outside the halls of Anaheim, California’s bustling NAMM show, Troy’s satisfied air between bites of shrimp and sips of beer strikes a dramatic contrast to the brutal, downright scary figure he cuts onstage with Mastodon, one of the most exhilarating bands on today’s hard rock scene.

In addition to sharing vocal duties with guitarist Brent Hinds, Troy has made a name for himself weaving bass lines of menacing beauty through Mastodon’s wicked tectonic shifts in mood, dynamics, and texture. His band’s widespread appeal rests on their ability to offer up astonishing slabs of cross-pollinated rock & roll. Today, Troy is taking full advantage of a respite from the oncoming whirlwind of activity that will accompany the release of Mastodon’s latest, Crack The Skye.

For nearly a decade, Mastodon has exhilarated listeners with its multiple streams of influence while retaining a singular identity and its own organic undercurrents. Mindbending arrangements host angular orchestrations colliding with bone-crushing heaviness. Intricate guitar interplay sinuously morphs into slinky riffs injected with Southern grease. All of this, or course, is wrapped around the hard swing of drummer Brann Dailor’s war-torn, battlefield rhythms.

As a bassist, Troy’s deft negotiation of this terrain has formed a style as unique as Mastodon itself. He’s a pocket player first and foremost, but he also breaks it up with commanding power chords. His tight fingerstyle is equally adept at heavy-bottom reinforcement and matching complex unison guitar lines with grooving counterpoint. He plays the middle ground as well, propelling the tunes with spacious contrapuntal lines and some of the hairiest bass notes in rock. Making their major-label debut for Warner Bros., 2006’s Blood Mountain witnessed the coalescence of both Troy’s style and Mastodon’s overall sound, once again attracting a broader legion of fans and accolades from critics and established rockers.

Like characters in one of the band’s epic tales, Mastodon found itself in the grip of peril in late 2007. A party following a gig at the MTV Video Music Awards ended with life-threatening injury to guitarist and vocalist Brent Hinds. With Hinds suffering multiple head traumas, enduring an extended hospital stay and facing a long recovery, the band’s future plunged into uncertainty.

Crack The Skye marks the troubled period, documenting Mastodon’s ultimate tale of creation. With Hinds’s immobility and dizzying bouts of vertigo came a more hallucinatory and emotionally driven compositional style, inspiring a deeper pull from the band’s remaining wellsprings of pain, loss, and hope. Mastodon has always had leanings toward progressive and classic rock. With the help of producer Brenden O’Brien, the band has honed in on these elements by creating a broader vocal dimension while managing to sound even heavier as a band. Soaking in the challenges met, the growth achieved, and the road ahead, Troy’s grin morphs into a gratified smile owed to a simple fact—he’s just made the record of his career.

We finally got to make a record in our hometown of Atlanta, which made our lives a lot easier. Doing Blood Mountain and Leviathan in Seattle was great, but this time around we wanted to record at home because we’re about to be on tour for a long time. SouthernTracks studio was a very comfortable environment. It’s beautiful, and the energy is super positive. Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen have recorded there, so you feel like you’re in a special building. Waking up everyday in our houses, driving four miles to the studio, being comfortable while we’re tracking, and then going home every night made it the best process yet.

We all pulled really deep for this record, both musically and lyrically. We tapped into thoughts, feelings, and emotions that we’ve channeled from dark and scary times within our personal lives. We’re always trying to challenge ourselves in finding the most unique parts and the most interesting sounds to cater to our brand of rock. Thankfully the bass is still very audible, despite the layers of gui- tars, vocals, harmonies, and atmospheric keyboards. I’m thrilled about that. It’s a very organic, massive, and big sounding Mastodon record. It’s true to our live sound.

Brent created the majority of the music for Crack The Skye. He had horrible brain hemorrhaging and suffered about eight months of intense vertigo where he was dizzy, seeing stars. It took a long time to get back into the rehearsal space to try to put ideas together. He spent months on his couch, sitting in his underwear with an acoustic guitar, just digging from a deeper, darker place in his soul to find the most beautiful and honest music that he’s ever played. When he finally made it into the practice space, he started introducing these ideas, and it became clear that we were about to head into a new direction as a band stemming from a brutal experience.

The four of us in the band have a massive appreciation of music across a wide spectrum. A lot of the music that started to emerge from Brent’s fingers was reminiscent of our favorite ’70s music, stuff that we grew up with and still lives with us as the soundtrack to our lives: Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, early Genesis, Thin Lizzy, and Frank Zappa. We focused on all these ideas and just tried to find the most beautiful parts and melodies. When most of the music was written it seemed to demand more complex vocals on top.

To a degree, yes. We’ve always wanted every record to be better than the previous one, but here we really tried to create riffs and vocal parts that will stick in peoples’ heads. The music was too intelligent, too deep, and too beautiful to just throw any type of vocal on there, so we had to dig deeper to find something that matched it.

We honed in on our vocals more than ever, trying to deliver patterns that are melodic and fitting. Great songs have a riff or a vocal part that gets stuck in your head. We tried to focus on that, and [producer] Brendan O’Brien was able to help in that regard.

First and foremost, personality. You can be an amazing record producer, but if we’re going to create a relationship and be working every day with you for hours at a time, we need to jell on a personal level. The four of us are basically silly cavemen—we’re ridiculous. We like to joke around and indulge in our goofiness, and Brendan is the same way. He’s a funny dude, a very real dude, and on top of that he’s got an amazing ear. I hope we can record another record with him.

Basically once we had a rough skeleton of the song, anybody could put out vocal melody ideas. This didn’t necessarily beg for aggressive vocals. So whoever had the first idea would hum the first thing that came to their brain and gut. We’d take turns, and whatever we collectively thought was the best we’d start elaborating to find a pattern that would be true to the song and melodic enough to be catchy. The best songs are those that stick in your head and you sing over and over until it drives you crazy.

We never really know what’s going to happen until we actually are in the studio figuring it out. Ultimately, it’s all about repetition. It just comes down to hashing it out in the practice space.

Yes. With the two guitar whizzes I share a stage with every night and a madman powerhouse of a drummer, it’s never been my agenda to overstep my boundaries. I’m a bass player. I’m trying to lock in with Brann’s feet constantly. When I’m doing vocals, the simpler the better, because I’m always doing a vocal pattern that’s different than the actual bass line. There’s no need to be flashy.

Last year, I was in Anaheim for the NAMM show, and from my hotel room I went on to Ebay to look for a vintage bass synth. I found a 1979 Moog Taurus Bass synthesizer pedal and I just bought it right then and there. A couple of days later it showed up and I just started slowly incorporating it into the new material we were creating. It really adds that low-end bass synth growl. I just hold down one note with the foot playing a bass part over it. At times that call for an underlying bass rumble, I could now do that with my feet. The band was thrilled that I bought a new instrument.

I’ve learned to sonically match the feeling I’m getting from each song. I’ve tried to be tasteful on what and where I do anything on the bass to be the best bass player for Mastodon as possible. When it’s feeling dirty and hairy, I need the heaviest, gnarliest bottom-end growl I can find. When it’s balls-to-the-wall, I love being able to freak out and turn into the manimal. Sometimes it needs to be smooth when there’s something soft, pretty, and spacious going on with the guitars. In those times I like to close my eyes and become one with the song through my bass. Those are the best of times. It’s amazing when you can zone out and drift away, eyes closed, making love to your bass. That may sound crazy, but I love it and live for it.

We’ve always appreciated atmospheric sounds, robot noises, and any and all things science fiction. We brought in Rich Morris, who’s an amazing musician and friend of ours from Atlanta. We basically told him, “Think Count Chocula meets Deep Purple.” Rich brought a lot to this record. It’s atmospheric and subtle, bringing beautiful underlying textures. We’ve always talked about doing that with our music, but it’s never really come to fruition until now.

For the past 20 years I’ve had this burning desire to create music and make a living at it, for better or worse. Along the way many great things have happened. When we played before Neurosis at the Contamination Festival in Philadelphia, that was the first time I really felt like it was mandatory to step up and be the best—it was not only a musical event but a religious experience. I remember at that moment thinking to myself, “You need to perform not only by yourself but with your band better than ever.” Being surrounded by my three bandmates— who I’ve got loads of respect for—I’ve got to be the best person and the best bass player possible, just to be involved in this project. So throughout all the sacrifices personally to be in this band the end result is the most satisfying because I have the opportunity to jam amazing musicians who I’m fortunate enough now to call my family.

Troy Tones

Both live and in the studio, Troy Sanders chooses instruments that speak for the particular tuning a song employs. For the bulk of songs with DGCF or CGCF tuning, Sanders selects his Fender Deluxe Precision, Fender Deluxe Jazz Bass, or Godlyke Deity. “I used the Godlyke for about a third of Crack The Skye,” says Sanders. “It has a really nice tone, and when I plugged in all of my basses, [engineer] Nick Didia and Brenden both preferred it. When we tune down to A, my Yamaha BB2004 handles that low growl better than the others.”

Troy’s pedal board hosts a constant rotation of distortions, wah-wah, and other effects he likes to tweak at random. “My pedals are my toys,” says Troy. “I like to have three or four distortions on my board and tinker around.” Troy’s current board contains an MXR Bass Octave Deluxe, an MXR El Grande Bass Fuzz, a vintage Sovtek Big Muff- Π, a Cobrahawk B12 Fuzz, a Moog MF-104SD Moogerfooger Analog Delay, an Electro- Harmonix POG Polyphonic Octave Generator, a Digitech Bass Whammy, a Boss RV-5 Digital Reverb, a Boss GEB-7 Bass Equalizer, and an old Morely wah pedal from the ’70s, selected for its “most intense sweep and gnarly growl.” Along with a Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner, the pedals take their power from a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus.

Taking a cue from past tour mate Justin Chancellor of Tool, Troy Sanders splits his signal to separate rigs for clean and dirty tones to maintain an unhindered layer of clean fundamental. For the Crack The Skye sessions, lines ran from a Fern DI and a miked Ampeg SVT-VR stack with a Mesa Engineering Titan V12 head, goosed with a Russian Big Muff through a Mesa 8x10 cabinet to supply the grit. On “Oblivion,” “Ghost Of Karelia,” and “The Last Baron,” Troy used his Digitech Bass Whammy on its DETUNE setting for the wobbly, chorus-like sounds. Sanders also plays a 1979 set of Moog Taurus Bass Pedals on “Quintessence,” “Ghost Of Karelia,” and “Crack The Skye.” Live, Troy’s synth pedals run through their own Mesa Boogie Big Block 750 head and 4x12 cab. Troy’s rack also holds an Ampeg SVT-4PRO head, a Monster Power Pro 2500 power conditioner and a Shure wireless system.