By Daniel Siwek

Born in South Africa, but raised in New York, multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter Josh Fix will soon debut with a full-lengther, Free At Last, but it was his demo EP, Steinway the Hardway, that got him on Eddie Van Halen’s speed dial. Without any formal training, the young talent wrote and performed his own symphony and is an example of how the video game generation rocks out with classical influences.

WRITING A SYMPHONY

I got this crazy idea in college that I wanted to do a symphony before I died; I wanted to conduct it and have it performed and all these things. I just thought that if I didn’t do it while I was young, when I could utilize all the resources of the college, I’d have to wait until I’m old and rich to afford an orchestra- not the most sound plan. So I begged my way into the music department and convinced them to let me do a thesis as a music major, I had to take all these composition classes to qualify for it.

That was the beginning of my real formal education and it turned out to be really helpful, because all the prerequisites you have to pass, like ear training and theory, have come in handy. It didn’t help that I couldn’t read a lick of music before I got the idea to write the symphony, but I had a MIDI notation program called Finale that helped me out a lot with the basics. With something like that, it was possible to kind of leap-frog my way through a crash course in symphonic orchestration.

LEARNING FROM ALBUMS

I was really frustrated growing up, because even as a young child I gravitated towards more complicated stuff, and trying to play music with slightly more sophisticated chord structures would be rough. I would play along to a lot of Queen records and even Supertramp gave me some problems; there were some things that they were doing that wouldn’t be apparent if you had only had a few years of music lessons; weird extended chords and inversions and other subtle stuff that someone without theory would probably have trouble with.

Making little breakthroughs on my own was really cool. I was 10 years old when I figured out the chord progression for “Take The Long Way Home,” and I was so psyched because I realized, “Wow man, these aren’t the normal three chords.” The key of the song changes three times in the first verse alone, and it was a concept that was really hard for me to wrap my head around at the time. For me it was a quantum leap. From there, things became clearer.

SINGING & PLAYING

I’ve had times where I’ll be playing and singing a song, and as soon as I start thinking to myself, “Hey wait a second, I’m singing and playing at the same time!” that’s when I start losing my footing. It’s like, up until the point you started thinking about it, the muscle memory –– or whatever it is –– made it work. But as soon as you get inside your own head, you’re interfering with your natural instinct.

VIDEO GAMES

I was reading this book called Everything Bad Is Good For You, by Stephen Johnson, and it’s all about how things that popped up in modern culture that you would think should be intellectually stifling (like video games, TV, and other sensory overload) are, in fact, really helpful. I keep the book close by so I can read it to my girlfriend whenever she gives me crap about playing video games. I found when I was doing a lot of writing that playing video games actually became a sort of meditation. It’s like the same sort of phenomenon that has to do with transcendental meditation; the whole repetitive action thing? And I heard how soldiers keep taking apart and putting their guns back together to keep their minds busy; so I found that even playing video games for 20 minutes indirectly gives me a major brain workout. You’re not consciously giving anything much thought –– it’s more of a meditative state –– but I think it stimulates a lot of ideas.

IN THE STUDIO

I’m barely over the depressing early stage, when you find out how little you know about production. It’s like, “What? There’s this thing called EQ and it makes everything sound better? Wow!” It was once like that, but I’ve heard from some experienced guys that my EP, Steinway The Hard Way, sounds good considering it’s from someone who didn’t know what they were doing. That’s because it was arranged well; if something is arranged well it should transcend the recording –– even though I still think the EP sounds shitty. [Laughs]

The keyboard is the basis, and that’s just because it’s such a huge instrument and takes up so much sonic space. If you play it right, it can almost be any instrument; it’s bassy, it’s percussive, you can play melody, and whatever. I went all around the Bay Area trying to find a place to record, but they all had immaculate Yamahas and it all sounded too nice. But when I found this antique upright piano at Hyde Street Studios, I knew that it would set the tone for the whole process. We used more microphones than you would think; at first we put them in the normal places, like over the strings, where the pedals are, but then we were sticking them all the way in the back of the room, under the piano, behind it, just to get any kind of ambience of the piano playing in the room.

TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT

Honestly, I’m not the best keyboard player in the world. I play other instruments and I don’t devote the time to it that I should in order to be better. If I come up with something –– like if I write a part for myself that is too difficult for me to play at first –– I’ll just work on it so I can play it, and it kinda makes me look like a better keyboard player than I am. But I think there’s a cumulative effect of me trying to challenge myself. I know that I’m getting better at handling what I need to play. That’s where the composition training comes into play; if you have more training- and you take advantage of that training, you can get to that point faster.