Could someone answer a really stupid question about guitars?

while guitarists can tweak and control their feedback, i've yet to hear a singer put mic feedback to any kind of positive use.

As for guitar feedback, it was radical and daring about 35 years ago. If I never hear it again it'll be too soon.

It makes good copy/looks good in print.

You just made sense of such a vast segment of my life that I spent sitting around trying to figure out what the fuck these people are talking about.

it more like "compression" bliss

and i mentioned on another thread that i was disappointed to see him "cheating" by using the whammy pedal when i saw them live (but i guess that you save money on broken strings/guitar assistant).

They don't know what reverb is.

Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music," for starters.

And John Lennon always reckoned he was the first, before Pete Townsend, and he may be right. There is a little burst of feedback at the beginning of "I Feel Fine."

-- gygax! (gygax0...), December 10th, 2003.

they had an exhibit of this at the Exploratorium. fugging great!! for those who don't know what it is, they have 5 (?) microphones with the chords attached to the ceiling. directly under each mic is it's corresponding amplifier. the people 'conducting' it pull back the mics and let them swing. each time the mic passes over the amp in a pendulum swing, the feedback gets louder and changes pitch (i think?). very very impressive. it was in practically a sound proofed room with windows. when they opened the doors to let out the 'conductors' it was deafening.

-- fact checking cuz (factcheckingcu...), December 10th, 2003.

What's that Pixie's song on Surfer Rosa where the song is all going normal (or, at least Pixies normal) and then Frank Black starts singing and his mic is 90% feedback?

There does seem to be a common misconception amongst non-musical people that 'distortion' equates to 'feedback'. Whenever my fellow guitarist and I burst into a distorted blues riff to jam on during church band practices, one of the singers always complains about the amount of feedback coming out of the speakers when there's no such thing - if she wanted to hear feedback, she should have come along to see my other band playing "Million words" (standard song intro: "This song starts Wedding Present, and ends My Bloody Valentine"). Now that was feedback.

OK, forgive me if this has been answered upthread, but the techie obsessive "Guitar Player" reader-in-the-90's answer is:

Because many of the "keyboardy" sounds - the flute sounds, some of the "ahs" and many of the strange floating ambient sounds that make that record so great ARE ACTUALLY GUITAR FEEDBACK, sampled, and processed, and played back as musical elements.

It's not bullshit at all. It's what the sounds actually are.

There's some wild mic feedback stuff in the last 2+ minutes of Mr. Bungle's "Desert Search for Techno Allah".

Awww, cheers. As you may have guessed from the name, I feel pretty stupid posting on here owing to my extremely limited knowledge of music compared to most people. I seem to use this board more as a massive font of musical knowledge than a regular board.