Andrew Hickey
speaker
2,253 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Andrew Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
They would do this with Van Bliet sat at the piano and playing fragments which he would have French transcribe.
Often his left and right hands would be playing in different keys, or he would come up with big ham fisted ten note chords, and French would have to transcribe these in such a way that they could be played by two guitarists.
The first piece they wrote this way was the guitar instrumental Darley's Car.
French's job was to transcribe Van Vliet's ideas and also to make them musically workable.
So for example, Van Vliet might come up with a figure that was five beats long, and insist that it be played along with another figure that was three beats long.
French would then have one guitarist play the three beat figure five times, while the other guitarist played the five beat figure three times, so both guitars would come back together after fifteen beats and they could move on to the next section of the song.
He would usually write his own drum parts, and these would be written not to provide the normal rock back beat, but instead to find a middle path between the different rhythms of the other instruments.
French talks in great detail about the compositional technique in his autobiography, and I'll quote a section here.
If a part didn't seem to fit with another part, I would search until I found something that would work.
This often took a few minutes, and I always assumed that if Don didn't like what he heard, he would just tell me that doesn't go with that, I meant this to go with that, or something to this effect.
However, that never happened even once that I recall.
This could have been for several reasons.
One is that he just didn't know how things were supposed to go together.
Another possibility is that he didn't care how things went together.
Another is that he didn't remember enough about what he had written to know the difference.
Bear in mind, however, that Van Vliet would also listen to a player occasionally and give a critical assessment of how he was playing a particular part, but this often had more to do with nuance than the actual notes.
If he didn't like the way the part sounded on guitar, he would work with the player, sometimes rewriting and or simplifying the part, and then I would generally ask the player to show me the new part so I could write it down.
Sometimes Don would spend hours just working with someone on nuance and feel, just to get the part working correctly.
Most of the time the guitars weren't plugged in, so the sound he would pull out of the players would be strictly technique, never gimmicks or electronics.
This was his area of strength, feel, nuance, dynamics, and instinctual characteristics, the same thing one hears in his extraordinary voice.
Showing 521–540 of 2,253 · page 27 of 113
← Previous
Next →