Five Finger Death Punch’s Zoltan Bathory was the special guest on the latest episode of ‘That Metal Podcast’
DJ and AC of ‘That Metal Podcast’ were recently joined by 5FDP’s Zoltan Bathory. Among the topics discussed are martial arts, fighting, art, music, spirituality and career beginnings. Also covered, covered in the interview are whether Zoltan started guitar or martial arts first, the bands AfterLife: Deluxe album including whether the band is recording a new album, songs that are in vault and some more revelations on songs written decades ago that ended up on 5FDP albums. The latest nugget being that riffs in the ‘Wrong Side of Heaven’ were actually written 20 years ago by Zoltan before ending up on the album in 2014.
Check out an extract of the segment of the interview below [transcribed by FFDP UK] where Zoltan talks about his own approach to songwriting.
On being named Metal Hammer’s Best Shredder in 2010 and his approach to music and song writing:
Here’s the thing. Obviously, you do have to have the musical ability. When you have the musical ability, and I’m going to put in there, you can write a hit song with four chords. In fact, most of the hit songs are four chords and a lot of those songs are actually the same chords. So you can do that, but when you get proficient on an instrument, at least your ideas are not held back by your abilities. So it’s not that ‘I can only play this’, it’s ‘I can play anything but I choose to play this.’
I believe that you do have to have the proficiency, you have to be mechanically able to play the things so it’s not a hindrance on your imagination and then once you learn to play like that and you choose to write a four chord hit song, then awesome! But I think it’s important, that you as a musician, that you master your instrument.
That Metal Hammer Award [for Best Shredder] is interesting because I’m not the typical shredder, let’s say like Yngwie Malmsteen. I’m not the lead kind of shredder. When I weas a kid I was a huge fan of that. Vinnie Moore. Yngwie Malmsteen, all those guys. Incredible players. I was a big fan of that and I was trying to play those things and I got pretty good. I could play, not as good, but fairly in the ball park somewhere. I remember when I started to understand that ‘well this is great but being a songwriter and being a shredder is not the same.’
[Just] because you can really play, doesn’t make you a great songwriter. Song writing is a completely different skill, it’s a completely different understanding and that’s what I meant by you do have to have the technical ability to play and do the things you imagined. but a songwriter has a very different way to approach music and what that is. What song writing is, is not the same thing.
Just to give you an example of how song writers should and actually do think, song writers that are successfu, most of them think this way. [Let me] give you an example, let’s say pick out Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, I can play you any of the parts and you [would] be able to tell me which one is winter, which one is summer, right so you can actually pick the seasons, which one that is. So without lyrics, just with the music, this composer can communicate very complex ideas and feelings or you can do down the list of Wagner, Tchaikovsky. All these guys had to write music without vocalists, yet give you a vibe, communicate some kind of a complex story. How are you going to do that with just music, right?
So there is that aspect, like you do have to understand how to reach in and change somebody’s mood, how to do this. How do I tell you a story with just the music right, so that’s one part, and then it has all the sub [parts], you have to understand major chords are generally happy chords and minor chords are kind of sad, and then the rhythmical pattens of things. If I play you a guitar riff and the drums on the guitar is a little bit lazy, like the snare comes a little bit late, like a shuffled beat on it right, you’re going to have this feeling of like ‘Oh man we’re cruising, good times.’ [But] if I take the same guitar riff and I tighten up the drums quantize it, it comes right on time, now you have this feeling of elation like ‘Man let’s go to war, let’s march, let’s rule, let’s go!’ because that’s what the music will give you.
And if I speed up the drums again it’s barely audible since it’s more a feeling than [actually hearing] that the snare maybe comes a little bit too early but you can’t really hear it but you feel it and I’m actually going to give you a feeling of anxiety with that.
So now imagine this, I gave you three different feelings, kind of chilling with the shuffle beat, that ‘let’s go to war’ kind of like pumped up and, anxiety. So this is three colours that I’m already playing with, let’s say the verse, I can make you anxious in the verse, with just the music, no lyrics yet, and then I’m dropping it into a shuffle beat in the chorus and then it’s giving you a feeling of relaxation. You have to understand these things and I didn’t even talk about again major chord, minor chords, the feeling that extra dimensions [bring] on top of it and this is just music.
So I’m physiologically affecting how you feel. I didn’t even say a word yet, so that’s what I got interested in when ‘okay I can play my instruments, I can shred’, as you said, but I’m much more interested in how do I communicate these feelings just with the music. I’m a huge fan of Ennio Morricone and Hans Zimmer, people who write soundtracks because that’s when it’s the most obvious because when the soundtrack is wrong, it kills the movie, it destroys the movie. When a soundtrack is good, you don’t notice it. When a soundtrack is excellent, it adds to the movie. I’m a big fan of soundtracks because that’s a very typical area when it’s very obvious if you’re doing it right or wrong. That’s how it works for me like understanding that.
Then there’s another element of the harmonies, melodies and what are the things that [affect] people in a very specific way and again, I’ll give you an example, if I play a piece of music and you say ‘Oh it sounds like it’s surf music, it should be the sound track for a surf movie.’ or I play you some dissonant crazy sounding things like ‘Oh this is a soundtrack for a horror movie.’ and then comes the question were we trained by society that you’re going to say this is the soundtrack to a horror movie because he saw so many horror movies and this was the kind of music, or if you played it to somebody who [has] never seen a horror movie, would they know?
So from shredding, that was the original question that we went around the whole universe on, but it’s important you are proficient with your instrument and I am happy about the time I got that award. I talked to the guys when I got that award and they said when Five Finger Death Punch came on the scene, you guys brought something different. There was a different sort of a percussive kind of complicated rhythm patten, percussive patterns with a groove that was very different to everything else at the time and that’s why they gave me that award. It really came out of because I switched to baritone guitars in the late 90’s so I was tuning down to baritone, b-standard basically and when you do that my strings were kind of like ship towing cables. My heaviest string is a 70 on my guitars. That’s kind of almost like a bass string. You’re almost going to have to learn guitar again, you develop something new because now the instrument is brutal to play but it has this ferocious tone but you start to lose the nuances. Your legato, your bends, all those things start to disappear because it’s just hard to play that instrument but you develop something new. And that’s what I developed this very percussive… it’s almost like you take your leads and move it down (laughs) into a heavy guitar. That’s what it was and that’s what we kind of recognised. This sounds different and it gave the band it’s unique sound. But still, with that said, I’m more interested in the science of song writing.