Secrets of the Guitar Heroes: Omar Rodriguez Lopez

• The At the Drive In/Mars Volta Playlist

• The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time

You were born in Puerto Rico and originally wanted to be a salsa pianist. Where is the connection between the extreme prog metal you write and play on guitar for the Mars Volta and the salsa and traditional Hispanic music you heard as a boy?
A lot of what I play is in minor keys, so it has the feel of our folk songs. Chords that sound good to me always take me back to my childhood. "Asilos Magdalena," on [2006's] Amputechture, started as an exercise. My dad played guitar with the thumb and first finger on his picking hand. I wanted to play like that and turned it into a song.

Music is a big aspect of Puerto Rican culture. At family get-togethers, everything revolves around improvising songs, singing about whatever is happening in the room. My father was a medic in the Navy, studying to be a psychiatrist, but he had his own salsa band with my godfathers and uncles, and he took me to practices.

What did you learn?
When I would get sad because it wasn't working out with me and the piano, my father and uncles told me, "Learn about the conga. Once you know the conga, then you can play the bass. Once you know those things, you can play anything. This is the earth, the roots." When I played with my father, it was always rhythm things, exercises. Talk about late blooming — I couldn't stand Led Zeppelin at the time. But I thought John Bonham and John Paul Jones were amazing. I used to wish I could get those records without the singing or guitar-playing.

Where is the salsa in the staccato time signatures and distortion of the Mars Volta?
It's the choice of notes and grooves. But a lot of the grooves are sped up so much that they are unrecognizable. The best example on [2005's] Frances the Mute is the choruses in "L'Via L'Viaquez." But when you speed them up and add distortion and delay, it sounds like another thing.

You are often compared to John McLaughlin and King Crimson's Robert Fripp. What was their influence on you?
They made me feel "I can do that," which is funny, because they are the opposite of how I approached the instrument. They are technically proficient. They know exactly what they're doing. When I first tried to play solos, I didn't know scales. I made up my own. It was about what sounded nice to me, the dissonance of it. But when I heard those guys, I thought, "They're doing it. It sounds good. That means I can do it too." I heard Black Flag at 12 years old and King Crimson at 16. They were huge milestones for me in the way I understood English-speaking rock music.

Was Jimi Hendrix an inspiration? The suites and atmospheres on "Frances the Mute" remind me of his guitar orchestrations on "Electric Ladyland."
That's my favorite stuff, the textural things. A lot of the long segues, the intros and outros in my songs, are written separately. Sometimes I'm in the mood for meditation music, things that take a long time to unfold. Then I realize they are in the same key as another song I'm writing and are begging to be put together.

0 Before the Mars Volta, you were in At the Drive-In, a two-guitar band. What was your half of that sound?
I would describe it as warfare. I hated the guitar at that point. My thing was to make it sound like anything but a guitar in the choice of notes and effects pedals. I took it as my job to pervert the songs as much as possible, to give them a bit of character.

How would you describe your tone in the Mars Volta?
Anything that is hurtful to the ear. It's been a running joke with engineers since the first album. I go, "We need more of this. We need that effect pedal." They go, "Well, it's completely fucking obnoxious now." That's my tone. There is something beautiful in anything intense and hard-going. The rewards are always greater.

You use dozens of effects pedals. What are good examples of how you use them?
I love the sound of delay pedals, particularly the Memory Man, because it has vibrato with the delay. It's two effects in one, the way the note wavers in and out. It sounds like an old lady speaking. At the beginning of "Roulette Dares (The Haunt of)" [on 2003's De-Loused in the Comatorium], the guitar has a frequency analyzer on it. It goes from this warm, sweeping sound to the high-pitched registers. It feels like your eardrums are about to break.

But you can also play simple, beautiful things like "Tourniquet Man" on the new Mars Volta album, "The Bedlam in Goliath." I'm surprised when I can play nice. I'm surprised even more when I keep it. I am such a child in that way. If I hear my engineer say, "Wow, I really like that," I go, "Really? Let's put that ring modulator on it. Now turn it backward. How do you like it now?"

[From Issue 1054 — June 12, 2008]

Related Stories:

• Q&A: The Mars Volta