#look the fundamental thing you have to realise is that half the time matt genuinely treats his guitar like a synth.

There was so much going on in the recording of Map of the Problematique! It's no simple song. Rich Costey explained the recording to EQ Magazine:

"Map of the Problematique," we ended up putting down the guitars first because Dom was out of town. That song was originally all done on keyboards and I really wanted to hear it on guitar, but it was impossible—there was no way to play the keyboard part on the guitar. We spent about two days back-engineering what the keyboard part was on guitar.

So it is actually a guitar that is going through three different modular synths that are opening up at different times. Two of the synths are routed into different pitch shifters - one is an octave up, the other is an octave down. Then we chose what octave we wanted to hear based on which synth we wanted to open up at which time. We had like an ARP 2600, some other things and a little spring reverb that was sort of playing the high octave. It was all done with hardware and the guitar was split into three: One went into the ARP 2600, Korg MS-20 and and EMS Synthi AKS.

On "Map of the Problematique," I basically put that whole guitar sound together. Matt just wanted to use a keyboard - he was a little unsure of whether a guitar was going to work. I really wanted a guitar sound and we did manage to back-engineer it to make it work. It took a couple of days, but we did manage to do it.

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I believe live Matt's guitar is hooked up to a pitch-shifter MIDI synced to a click-track that automatically shifts the pitch... maybe that's why they didn't play it as often? The upward-ballooning guitar intro in Kill Or Be Killed is a similar off-stage MIDI-controlled pedal, if you see live performances of the song, Matt isn't near his pedalboard when playing the riff. Maybe having one synced MIDI covers the effort of 2 synced MIDIs is why MOTP made a comeback this tour?

#look the fundamental thing you have to realise is that half the time Matt genuinely treats his guitar like a synth.#That's where Muse's unique sound comes from #Costey was also talking about how Chris cultivated his own unique bass sound over the years that really gives the trademark Muse sound—#absolutely pounding on the lower end #muse band #matt bellamy #rich costey #EQ Magazine #black holes and revelations #production #Map of the Problematique