Roger Fisher
credits: with heart dreamboat annie (mushroom records), magazine (mushroom records), little queen (portrait), dog and butterfly (portrait), solo albums standing, looking up (ficom), forest rain (ficom), evolution (ficom).
Background
Roger Fisher is best known as founding guitarist of the supergroup Heart. After leaving Heart in 1979, Roger performed and toured with the band Alias. Alias made two appearances on the Tonight Show and churned out a few hit records, including a number one single. Since then Roger has embarked on a busy solo career consisting of both music and film. We caught up with Roger one evening in his personal studio to discuss his Macintosh and current projects.
MacDirectory: What part does the Macintosh play in your studio?
Roger Fisher: Actually, I am hoping it will begin to play an even bigger part soon. I am about to upgrade to ProTools/24 and then Ill be in that realm all the time. I love being in the digital domain like that, you dont have to wait for tape to rewind and stuff like that. Things are just much more instant. Right now, I use it for its ease of editing and all of those kinds of things. The doors it opens for a songwriter are just incredible.
MD: Can you give us an example of this?
RF: Yeah, one day I had this idea that it would be fun to combine modern technology and catch the vibe of something ancient. I started playing acoustic guitar in this mode that was kind of Eastern sounding and I jammed on it for quite a while to a metronome click-track. Now when you do this, you will have some degree of mistakes and some degree of inspirational playing while youre hunting and probing. I probably recorded twenty minutes' worth of stuff and selected little bits here and there. Then I started assembling those pieces and found all the ways that they sounded musical.
MD: It's great how the ability to move digital audio around so easily gives you the opportunity to audition how parts will sound under different arrangements.
RF: Yeah, I just kept doing this until pretty soon, I had created a song that sounded like three acoustic guitar players that were playing a really well crafted composition together. I named it "Ancient Intuition" because it wasnt an intellectual thingrather it happened with a kind of serendipity. This is kind of the theme of a four-album compilation that Im putting out.
MD: Can you tell us more about this project that youre working on?
RF: The entire four-album concept is to promote spiritual awakening. Its a tough thing to talk about because its still kind of "out there" to so many people. Through meditation, prayer or any focused concentrated effort you get closer to attaining a deep spiritual state and when that happens, it attracts good things. When you start living your life by doing that as much as possible, it affects other people and influences them to do similarly.
MD: Is each album going to be released at the same time?
RF: No, each one is its own separate entity. The one thread of continuity through the four albums, however, will be variety. The music ranges from '70s arena rockI like that stuff and still perpetuate it at the risk of sounding pass (laughs) and tribal music. I really like Peter Gabriel, so a lot of the music has a very ethnic feel to it. I call it new age tribal rock. The four-album concept is called "One Vision" and its the name of a feature film that Im writing.
MD: Sounds cool. Is there anything platform specific that you prefer about the Macintosh?
RF: I think in general the Mac is a lot more fun and easier to use than the PC. To me, the PC feels a little more "left brain" oriented and the Mac is a little more "right brain".
Check out Roger Fisher's web site
