Boston’s Tom Scholz Talks About Crafting Their Unique Concert Experience
Boston & Joan Jett play MGK’s Big Gig on July 27 at BB&T Pavilion. Guitar virtuosso & studio mastermind, Tom Scholz recently spoke about his dedication to creating an impeccable live concert experience & the technological wizardy he employs to make each tour a unique experience.
During his interview with People Magazine, Scholz expounded on a vareity of topics, including how he tricked his record company into accepting his basement recordings for the first Boston albm as ‘new’, as well as, how he personally crafted the live experience concert goers get when they see Boston on this tour.
“All of the equipment you see at a Boston show was either invented or designed by me and a company I had for a while or is equipment that we modified very specifically for the task,” Scholz explains. “So we’re able, with six people, to very accurately reproduced the albums. All six people sing and all six people play very well. Live, we are probably the only major act that doesn’t play with a digital system. Everything, including the mixing board, is analog.”
Scholz when on to explain his dedication to giving fans the parts of the songs and albums they loved when they come to see a Boston concert.
“I had two goals: One was to reproduce all of the parts that people would recognize in the songs that they liked. Number two was to always take it a step further — take the arrangements a step further, take the idea of a show a step further; having a real concert….But my intent was to do something nobody had ever heard in the studio before, and then do it live.”
If you’ve ever seen Boston before, Scholz ensures fans that they’ll get a different experience on this tour. “There’s something new on every tour,” he says. “There’s nothing that’s pre-recorded. There’s always a lot of new music — extended arrangements for songs, segues between songs — I try to do several new things every year, and there’s a great deal of that this year. For example, there’s a duel between a guitar and the bass — which are invisible, they only light up when they’re being played — which culminates in a huge lightning bolt that travels around the stage and explodes on the screen.”
Boston’s leader also had some potentially controversial words about the digital recording process, “I know that I will be angering millions of people who have their laptop and just record through the microphone directly into the laptop and think that they’re making home recordings that are worth something, but I have nothing good to say about digital recording and especially when it comes to audio quality. That whole transition [from analog to digital] kind of left me cold.”
