OTHER TECH

Your new coffee-table book, Billy F. Gibbons: Rock + Roll Gearhead (MBI; motorbooks.com), is filled with lavish photos of two of your favorite things: cars and guitars. Indeed. While writing the book, the expressions I needed to use regarding the rapidly changing field of sound began moving outside of my comfort zone. So I visited AIX Studios in Los Angeles, whose primary focus is producing multichannel music. For the first time in a long time, I was returned to the world of the undisturbed listening experience. I heard subtleties like the amp of a bass player crackling behind me, and the squeak of a drum pedal - real-life incidents and sound events that were delightfully uplifting during playback. There's no question that we live in a 360° environment, and recreating your favorite sounds with that in mind is a natural. Surround brings more enjoyment to the music-listening experience than thousands and thousands of watts or hundreds and hundreds of pieces of outboard gear ever could. So we're actually getting more sophisticated through the beauty of simplicity.

Do you remember how the first surround events came through movies, and at that early stage, the best you could hope for was some subwoofer action when a truck would come rumbling by, or in a war-zone scene when bombs would go off? You'd get a little extra bump in the rear. But it was enough to suggest, "Hey, let's try to create a full range of sounds in every direction."

So have you thought about recasting your older material in surround? Yes. We had a brief break during the 2005 tour that provided an opportunity to go into the studio. And as we were working on new material, we decided to experiment with older material in the surround domain.

Like what - classic songs such as "La Grange"? "La Grange," "Sharp Dressed Man," "Legs," and a couple of the different blues numbers that we do. Quite unexpectedly, upon entering the multidimensional arena, songs that we had grown used to hearing in one or two dimensions suddenly became completely different. It was almost as if we were listening to things that we couldn't quite place.