PERFORMANCE: Muse - New Born & Plug In Baby

Total Guitar
July 2001

The current single may be New Born, but Muse's Matt Bellamy is no novice on guitar. 

These two singles taken from their forthcoming album, Origin Of Symmetry, show Muse have a strong voice of their own. Plug In Baby, which went straight to the charts at No.11 on its release in March this year, reveals, the classical guitar influences in Bellamy's playing. The opening melody has echoes of Bach's Toccata in D Minor, and makes heavy use of the B harmonic scale (B C# DE F# G A#). Similarly, the epic sounding recent single, New Born, has an almost Paganini-like solo and a structure that borders on prog-rock. There's even a diminished 7th in there! 
 However, while he is undoubtedly a great player, his playing is very energetic with rough edges, rather than overly polished. His choice of sounds too, ranging from subtle clean tremelo to fuzz distortions, owes more to grunge than prog.
 Bellamy has played a number of guitars, partly due to his habit of smashing them up, but his current fave is a Manson, complete with a built-in-phaser and gated distortion. He needs a stack of effects to create the diverse sounds he gets, including a Digitech whammy pedal (see the solo in New Born), assorted Boss and Lovetone pedals, a Line 6 DL-4 delay and a Roland VG-8 guitar-synth, which he uses to instantly detune his guitar, and probably used for the distorted line that doubles the bass in New Born.  

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