Alex Webster Q&A
SWR’s Tony Franklin talks with the Cannibal Corpse bassist about touring, songwriting, technique and SWR …
Alex Webster.
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In all of SWR’s many years of experience with the world’s top bass guitarists and most discerning bass tone enthusiasts, we’d have to say that we’ve never come across a death metal bassist as cool, gracious, articulate and fleet-fingered as Cannibal Corpse’s Alex Webster, who has as of now logged 21 years, countless concert tour miles and a great many decibels with his Buffalo, N.Y.-bred quintet.
The nimble Webster kept SWR fans apprised of his worldwide travels and musical goings-on in his SWR online tour diary last year, and he and his fellow Corpse corpsmen are currently in the midst of a seemingly endless series of club and festival tours at home in the United States and abroad (troublesome Icelandic volcanoes notwithstanding).
Webster packs a volcanic sound in his own right thanks to the pair of gargantuan SWR SM-1500™ amps and dual Megoliath™ cabinets he uses whenever possible. He’s also recently been extolling the sonic virtues of the diminutive new SWR headlite<™ amp, which still gives him the huge sound he needs while being a lot easier to carry and fit in the overhead compartment.
Webster kindly sat down for a few minutes with SWR’s own tireless in-house bass legend, Tony Franklin, for a wide-ranging conversation about career longevity, metal’s sense of community, songwriting, bass technique and his SWR gear. Here’s the scoop from our favorite Cannibal …
TF: Cannibal Corpse has been together a little over 21 years now, and it seems that 2009 was one of your best touring years ever …
AW: I would say yeah. We’ve had a really long, killer career, and if it had ended before 2009 it still would have been something we would have been satisfied with. But in 2009 we got to do a lot of things that we either had not done in a long time—like go to Japan—or that we had never done, like doing a really, really massive festival tour in the United States with a lot of our favorite bands. Slayer, in particular, is one of our very favorite bands, so being able to do a tour with them this past summer was a dream come true.
There are just so many people at those shows. I mean, we’re used to doing club tours and that sort of thing, where you’re playing in front of 500 to maybe 1,000 a night. Well, on the Mayhem festival, in the smallest city, a couple thousand people will be there. And the big ones, you’re talking 15,000, 17,000 people, and that’s something—there’s nothing quite like that.
TF: To what would you attribute your longevity and your success all these years?
AW: I think, because we’ve been kind of focused on doing things—I mean, I don’t want to say in a predictable way—but in a way that’s dependable. Our fans can depend on us. We’ve been very consistent, I guess you could say, in a couple of ways. Artistically, I think we’ve been consistent in that the band that we started out to be is the band that we still are—a really heavy death metal band.
And then, as far as our work ethic goes, we’ve stuck with it the whole time and done records along the way. And that’s our part of it, but a really big part of it—probably the biggest—is that our fans have appreciated that and have come out and been supportive of us the whole time.
I think that if you don’t let your fans down, they will stick around. They’ve never let us down, for sure, so we want to make sure that we return that by being as consistent and as hard-working as possible to give them what they want.
TF: Speaking of work ethic, we’re told that on one tour there were some backline problems and that you guys shared your gear with other bands in an effort to help. That says a lot about you as a band.
AW: We try to be easy to work with. And we’ve also been on the other end of the deal a few times. On that tour that you’re talking about, where we loaned out some gear, we were the headliner. But we’ve also opened a lot, and when the headlining band treats you well, that’s good. When they don’t treat you so well, that’s not so good.
And any band that tours with us, we want them to be happy with that experience. One way to do that is, when someone’s having a hard time with gear or whatever situation, to try and be accommodating. You can bend the rules a little bit—if somebody, for whatever reason, does not have their gear that particular night, don’t make ’em go rent something; just let them use some of your stuff, if it can happen that way.
Drum kits are where it’s difficult. It’s hard to let one drummer use another’s, but with amps and things you can generally loan some stuff if there’s an emergency situation like that.
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Webster with his dual SWR SM-1500 amps and dual Megoliath cabinets.
Photo by Alison Webster
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TF: That’s cool, because not all bands have that attitude. That separates the good guys from the not-so-good guys.
AW: Yeah. We’re all out there, and we’ve got to try and make things easy for each other, because touring can be kind of difficult sometimes. You’re not always dealing with the ideal conditions, so you shouldn’t try to make it harder for each other; you should try to make it easier.
TF: You’re involved in the writing—what’s your band’s writing process like?
AW: It generally starts out with one or two of the guys having an idea on their own. For me, I’ll go and write some parts at home and them bring them up and show them to the guys, after I’ve got maybe three or four parts strung together.
I usually don’t get a whole song done and just show it to them that way. Usually it’ll be something where I’ll teach them half of the parts I’ve written; we’ll play them together and see if we like where the song is going and then take it from there. It’s the same thing the other guys will do—they’ll write a bunch of parts at home; bring them and teach them to me and the other guys, and we’ll just kind of work our way through it.
It’s hard to write a song from start to finish without hearing it with the whole band. I like to be able to hear how it’s developing and how it sounds with the whole band. It’s just not the same as hearing MIDI instruments do it—I mean, there are some good replicators and that kind of thing out there these days, but there’s nothing like hearing the whole band playing together. That’s when you can decide if you’ve got some good stuff or not—when you hear the whole band playing it.
So that’s how that goes. The music gets done first; then we write lyrics afterward and hammer it out and practice it for a while, and then take it to the studio. Usually, the writing process is about six months or so for us for a whole album. And then we’ll spend a month or two in the studio, and then it’s time to get on the road.
TF: Gear-wise, you recently started using a massive SWR rig—tell us about that.
AW: Yes. I’ve got two 1,500-watt SM-1500 heads, which are super-loud and also crystal-clear. It’s powerful, but it’s crystal-clear power, which is what I actually want. A lot of guys in metal have a distorted tone; I actually go for a pretty clean tone.
I feel like, for a band like us, where we’ve got two guitar players—and we’re tuned low in the first place—and they’re both already playing with a whole lot of gain, I like my bass to be the low fundamental of what they’re playing. They’ve already got plenty of fuzz on their sound, so I don’t need to have more of that on my bass. I’d rather have it be a nice crystal-clear fundamental note of the riff that they’re playing underneath.
TF: And it has to be tight.
AW: Yes. So having it be tight and clear is really important for me. And those two heads deliver that, and so do the two cabinets that I’ve got—I’ve got two 8x10 Megoliath cabinets, and those are just amazing. They’re great cabinets. It’s definitely the loudest rig I’ve ever played through. Loudest and clearest. I love it.
TF: The new headlite amp is also out now. Do you think you’ll find it useful?
AW: Yeah, definitely. There are a lot of gigs that we do where we’re flying in and flying out, and I have to rely on rented backline for those, because you can’t fly around with an SM-1500 or a Megoliath—it’s a little beyond our budget to ship that stuff.
So we’ll send out an equipment rider, and sometimes we get what we want and sometimes we don’t. But if I’ve got an amp that sounds amazing that I can put in my carry-on, like the headlite, that just solves that problem. It’s less than four pounds, so I can really just take that with me, and then I’m gonna have my sound wherever we go. So it’s gonna be awesome.
Webster onstage.
Photo by Alison Webster
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TF: How did you develop your playing style? Who were you listening to and how did that evolve?
AW: Definitely, back when I started, I was listening to Steve Harris. Billy Sheehan, I liked a lot and still do. Still love all these players. Also, in the very beginning I listened to, really, more guys who are known for more straightforward kind of playing; Cliff Williams from AC/DC and Peter Baltes from Accept are a couple of my favorite players.
But yeah, I did get into the more challenging stuff, like what Steve Harris does and Billy Sheehan’s playing. Cliff Burton, from Metallica, is one of my very favorites. Steve DiGiorgio from the band Sadus, and he’s also played with some other bands, like Testament and Death.
So all the finger-style players in metal who were really doing some cool stuff—stuff where you could hear it. There are a lot of metal bands where the bass player is really underneath everything, and I like guys who manage to get out on top of the mix and make themselves heard in a way that made the songs better.
TF: So you play completely finger-style? Do you play with a pick at all?
AW: Completely finger-style, yeah. I mean, I messed around with a pick a little bit a year or so before Cannibal was even together, and it wasn’t for me—fingers always seemed more natural, so that’s the way I’ve always played with Cannibal Corpse. Just all finger-style.
But I had to develop something that’s kind of like what Steve DiGiorgio or Billy Sheehan do, as far as the three fingers on the right hand. It was a very big deal for me to get that down. I could not do the kind of stuff that the guys in Cannibal want me to do without having that third finger in the mix. My two fingers are just not fast enough. Some guys have that super-fast two-finger thing, but I need to get an extra one in there.
TF: What’s coming up for Cannibal Corpse?
AW: We’ll be doing another North American tour in April and May. And then in the summer we’re doing a whole bunch of big festivals over in Europe. The whole usual list of the great festivals they have there—like the Graspop Metal Meeting; that’s a really big festival in Belgium. We’re doing the Wacken festival in Germany, With Full Force; Summer Breeze festival in Germany. Just trying to really get over there and do a bunch of those festivals, because they’re all really excellent places for extreme music like what we do. It’s almost like a big camping trip or something—all the fans have their tents set up and are there for the whole weekend.
TF: They seem to be a lot more into the more extreme music in Europe and South America.
AW: Yeah, for sure. I mean, in Germany you have all these huge festivals. You go to South America, and a band like us can headline and get a couple thousand people at each show.
We have great success here in North America too, but it’s a little bit bigger in South America, for sure, and Europe—they just have a bigger festival scene over there. Like, the Wacken festival—I think the last time we played there, there were 70,000 people there. And we actually finished off the main stage in 2007. We were the last band; I don’t know if we were technically considered the headliner or not—we played last, so why not? We’ll call ourselves the headliner. But we were the last band on the main stage at the 2007 Wacken fest, on Saturday night, and I’ve never played in front of that many people in my life, before then. They said there were 70,000 people there, and I think they were all standing there watching. So that’s something. There’s nothing like it.
TF: Do you think you’ll still be doing this 21 years from now?
AW: (whistles) Oh boy … if my neck holds up. We’ll see (laughs).
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