It’s a close to twenty year old SansAmp Classic, an analog micro-circuitry box used to do the guitars on Guns, Booze & Jesus.
It was designed to produce the three basic guitar amplifier tones — Marshall, Mesa Boogie and Fender — and all the variations in distortion, clean timbre and in-betweens one can get from them so that they could be piped directly to a recording console without the need of miking an amplifier.
About a decade after I bought the SansAmp digital guitar amp modeling hit the marketplace. The SansAmp, however, is not a computer.
Years on, I’m convinced the standard listener (and almost everyone else) simply can’t tell the difference in a recording, whether the guitar is laid down from a standing amp, a digital direct injection amp emulator, or the SansAmp. If enough time has elapsed so I don’t remember what I used, even I can’t tell.
Here are some for comparison. Can you tell? Bet not.
Guns, Booze & Jesus — SansAmp, set to sound like a cranked Fender Bassman.
Act Naturally — SansAmp made to sound like a Vox amp.
The Stench — SansAmp front-ended with Static Egg fuzz.
GE & Jeff — can’t remember and can’t tell from listening to it.
And, appropriately, today and tomorrow, Don’t Vote for Dicks, which was trying for a country-ish sound, done by a made-in-China Line6 PocketPod, a guitar computer that’s a palm-sized kidney bean. Which I hardly use at all but which, on the spur of the moment, sounded right.
Use an app to plug your guitar into your smartphone? Eat shit. I can make something sound better with an old thing put on the market thirty years ago that’s the same size.
Snark aside, the biggest help in getting a guitar track to sound like something on a favorite record is a knowledge of what was used and what the tonal characteristics of the particular guitar/amp combination were. The rest is equalization and your hands. Specific gear made for that makes it easier to accomplish.
Would I use big old vintage amps if I were in a high end old school studio? Well, it sure would be fun.
But you’ll never convince me it would make much difference. In the end, it’s a few millivolts of signal crammed down into one song, a part among others.
2012 Election Boogie. Rock. Rise up to kill the Commies, science men and fluoride. There was no way to sing such a song without toggling the “mean vocal” effect on the recording console.
Nothing has changed, except they’ve become louder and much worse since the primaries.
The enemy in music for the election countdown.
Global warming and evolution as hoaxes, hound gays, hoard a big pile of gold, put people to death — as many as you can and as quickly as possible, scary Ted Nugent. I got to the screw with the reproductive rights of women bits later.
It’s a lot to stick in one tune.
And I’ll have one later this week, another in the string of ZZ Top-styled satires of the state of that part of the country that dearly wants to redo the Civil War.
“She Just a Girl, Eddie,” the only tune I like enough to play more than twice on the new Darkness album, Hot Cakes. Call it a descendant of the “magnificently silly love songs” the band used to do but which are now mostly absent. (Plus it’s a tune you just can’t pull off in small clubs any more than Starz could make “Cherry Baby” work live the way it was recorded in ’77. Check the YouTube tour footage for “Eddie” if ya don’t believe me. Just not quite the same thing.)
Mixed by Toronto Bob Ezrin, famous in the Seventies for giving us Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd, among a lot of other stuff, the album is C+/B- high impact but poppy hard rock.
Nine years is a span. The songwriting isn’t quite up to it, anymore, except for the excerpted tune and a ballad, “Living Each Day Blind.”
The rest is raise-your-fist-and-yell-then-flick-the-lighters-on-the-last song arena rock. It’s tight, busy and perfect sounding but not as memorable as it needs to be except for the amazing voice of Justin Hawkins. Which he works overtime, spoiled by the fact that almost all anyone will recall is that he lets out a gratuitous falsetto shriek about all the guys who wanted to suck his cock back in the day on the initial tune.
That’s a move, or glam rock tableau, good for automatic entry into the Fool’s Hall of Fame in 2012. Why didn’t Toronto Bob say to ’em, “Boys, I’m going to save ya hilarity, which you’ll be the object of, on this one, trust me,” and just bury it?
Without a miracle it won’t get to half a million copies, which is what Permission to Land did here in 2003.
Even “She’s Just a Girl, Eddie” is more complicated than it has to be. Lotsa stuff in it which could be thrown out and the horse would still trot.
Every week YouTube/Google editors find some dogshit to highlight, always by celebrity musicians or someone who really doesn’t need any more fame or publicity.
Today, it’s “Pyschedelic Music!”
From YouTube:
The ’60s might be long gone, but a new crop of musicians is embracing the era’s experimental, anything-goes aesthetic. Whether it’s through mind-expanding visuals or adventurous songs, psychedelic music is alive and well. Even Neil Young’s doing it!
Neil Young, a ‘new crop-type of musician,’ whose ‘new’ shtick is low-res videos cobbled together from other old pieces of film downloaded from YouTube. Only when you and I do it, no bonus points.
Mr. Herbert Lom had the title role in a not very successful remake of “The Phantom of the Opera??? (1962); he was Van Helsing in “Count Dracula??? (1970), one of many movies starring Christopher Lee as the notorious vampire; and he played a bloodthirsty witch hunter in 18th-century Austria in the ultra-gory German-made “Mark of the Devil??? (1970), which developed a cult following for its explicit torture scenes; audiences were handed “stomach distress bags??? at cinemas around the world. — the New York Times
While I remember the vomit bags at the Pine Grove matinee, I don’t recall much about the movie. However, Chief Inspector Dreyfus was unforgettable. Would Peter Sellers have been quite as funny without him in the alternating scenes?
If you don’t think it’s funny you can’t be my friend.
A little over two hours of recording, not bad for a quick joke where I had to come up with a song to fit a comical monster movie vibe. And, yeah, except for the drums which are programmed, I do play all that stuff.
From Mark Smollin, DD band drummer at Saturday rehearsal, after a few rounds of it on early-Seventies style hard rock. It’s a Holowon Static Egg, now ten years old, I think, dating back to when a niche US industry for handmade guitar effects, usually copies of old classic circuits, emerged. Think — not made in China — where the major manufacturers shipped all their production and tooling.
The Static Egg is a fuzz tone and they’re basic equipment for copping the feel of Sixties and early Seventies blues rock. A good one, and this is, enables a great woolly distortion, static-y shrill squealing noise, horn-like bleats, and just about everything in between.
When it’s on, it sounds righteous, from slightly compressed and clean to heavy and crushing with a twist of the guitar’s volume knob. And it tears its own hole in any mix. (It’s not necessary to explain the knob functions. You just twiddle until it sounds right. There’s nothing to it.)
For example, if you have a Stratocaster and you want to do something ala Jimi Hendrix, a certain kind of fuzz tone — called a Fuzz Face, helps a lot. The Static Egg isn’t a Fuzz Face but it will still do the job.
This tune shows it off well. It gives a bit of sustain to the clean guitar parts, makes the jangly and twangy stuff more penetrating, furnishes the crunch on power chords, and does the bleats and stereotypical Sixties fuzz sounds, too
Strat and Static Egg fuzz (plus an octave-up fuzz on the outro.)
C’mon, this is a great spoof with a nice grifted image of LiLo, too.
After I bought mine, the production of Static Eggs seemed to stop for many years. More recently, a newer model has been spotted, one with four knobs and a bit more of a conventional look. But I’ll always have mine, it looks fine now with ten years of wear and the Letraset transfer lettering still very legible. Fuzz tones are close to being bulletproof.
The Static Egg also is the primary sound for Carla Sandwich, which accentuates what you can do for the sake of trash rock.
YouTube rewards users who upload demos of equipment. like fuzz tones, where the player sits around, plays a few riffs from favorite songs and twists knobs by himself. A more valid demonstration is to show it in a recording. But that’s harder, YouTube doesn’t reward the practice, and it makes tyros and amateurs whine they can’t hear the guitar and box by themselves.
In the real word, not Google/YouTube’s universe of dull copycats, guitar players use effects and tone in the context of tunes.
Fuzz tone effects didn’t capture the imagination because they were popularized by random nerds humorlessly copying fragments of someone else’s famous riffs. They were in radio cuts by the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin.
If you’re in Pasadena near Colorado and just west of Old Town on Saturday afternoon and have nothing better to do, come by and see an open rehearsal of DD and company doing the tunes posted on the blog.
We go from 2 to between 5 and 6, depending on the temperature. And we take breaks.
Come by, say hello and introduce yourself, chat only if you want, leave when you get sick of it. It might will get loud. If the house is rockin’, don’t bother knockin.’ Just come in.
