guitar duels no.2> Nile Rodgers v Kevin Shields

Message Bookmarked
Bookmark Removed
my heart goes with NR, but I just can't decide. any takers?

jamie, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Nile speaks with his hands. Kevin speaks with his pedals. They're both eloquent, but Rodgers takes it (as a "guitarist" rather than a "signal- chain assembler").

Douglas, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Sir Douglas speaks the truth.

Andy K, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

signal-chain assembler sounds so much more interesting though ...

fields of salmon, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I work for Nile Rodgers, the idea of him battling Kevin Shields in a guitar duel is just great. They are both great players and haven't done anything relevant in years. I will ask him if he wants to battle...his response will probably be, "Kevin who?....My Bloody what? Man I got Diana Ross on the phone, leave me alone!!!!!"

my vote is for Shields!! I am bias, I havent gotten a raise in years!

brianq, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

even if He were up for it, alas, I'm not sure we'd be able to lure Mr Shields out of the house... maybe Nile could organise a vocal duel in which Diana Ross sings 'Feed Me With Your Kiss' and Belinda sings 'DoobeDoobdDoobeDoodnkhamun' or whatever it's called.

jamie, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Douglas lies, insofar as Kevin doesn't do any more signal- processing than the next guy -- in fact, I'd wager that his live set- up made use of less pedals than Nile's. All that Shields-work is just one hand working a floating tremolo bar.

nabisco%%, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

let's forget pedals, then. let's talk OVERDUBS. Nile = a hell of a lot fewer than Shields. Nile by a good distance, even if I do think Loveless is a better album than Real People

M Matos, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

my heart goes with NR

aka me, meaning you choose Kevin. Hurrah!

Anyway, what Nitsuh said. It just seems like more pedals and effects than it is. Relevant part of the interview I did:

In that case, I guess everything just came across as being much more like the album than I thought possible.

It's just the guitar. As far as I could figure out, people hear the guitar and imagine about five things happening at the same time, because of the pitch change. This isn't my theory, but it seems like when it changes pitch and moves up and down like that, some part of peoples' brains separates each part of that pitch variance into a layer. The brain goes, "Right, there's about five guitars there." But on the record, there's never more than two or three guitars at any one point. There's less guitars on our record than there is on an R.E.M. record, let me put it that way. When there's one guitar, it's full-on. When we play live, we're playing the same as we are in the studio, it's pretty much the same. People know that we use something besides just playing live, and they just think it's tapes. One of the things that created the tape effect was that Colm had a sampler on-stage, and we'd have stuff from the record, the few incidental bits connecting the songs. Colm triggered them, played them whenever it came into his mind. They were basically a couple of bits. The way they were on the record, it was the bits between "Soon" and the one before, and sometimes he'd just play that because he'd take too long between songs, and he'd just start making noise for people from nothing. Some of the greatest compliments we got paid were the reviews that went on about the fact that they could hear lots of stuff that we couldn't possibly be playing, moving our mouths but obviously not singing, just miming. I thought, "Brilliant!" People were actually thinking we couldn't do that.

That's what I had been thinking all this time! I didn't mind in the least!

It is funny when people realize how little there is. The way I've got the guitar and the amps all set up, I've got it so there's two completely different sounds, with a bit of delay between them. I play both of them at the same time, which means I'm out of time with the music slightly, depending on which part of the music I'm listening to.

Is that part of the 'glide guitar' effect I've heard so much about?

That was just a joke! But all I mean by 'joke' is that I came to the conclusion that 'maybe I'm playing guitar in a new way,' and I thought, "Right, I'll call it 'glide guitar.'" And that was it. After a year or two, you began to see it in people's terminology. The idea was that that was the way it moved, that's all....Just bend the tremelo arm when you play a chord. It just goes, "Beeeeooooowww." That's it! It's so simple, it's unbelievable it hasn't happened before! That's the funny part, because you don't really presume you've invented a new type of playing, when there are so many millions of people playing the guitar. You don't think, "Oh, I've found a new way of playing." It's just whatever comes into your head, you go, "Aahh...whatever!" Then after a while it dawned on me that people seemed to shy away from playing like that. I can imagine why they wouldn't get into it, because if you're not into it it sounds like shit. It sounds really terrible, a gratuitous bending of chords out of tune. But if you're into it, you move it, somehow, with the music.

Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Who's Nile Rodgers' Bobby Gillespie?

J Blount, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

It just came to me...Diana Ross.

J Blount, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

better to ask who WASN'T Rodgers' Gillespie: Ross, Madonna, Duran Duran, Robert Palmer, list goes on and on and on....

M Matos, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Christ, I forgot about Robert Palmer - "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On" blows away anything on XTRMNTR.

J Blount, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

and it's STILL not as good as Cherrelle's Jam-Lewis original

M Matos, Tuesday, 28 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I thought Shields was pretty close to being ILM's patron saint, so I'm surprised how many are going for Nile Rodgers. Quite right too, by about a million miles.

Martin Skidmore, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

He and Edwards were the masters of economy, unquestionably. Hurrah!

A million miles, though, no. I prefer to think of them on planets rotating around the sun in the same orbit. ;-)

Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

COLLISION COURSE. SHIELDS UP! (ha ha i made funny)

Sean Carruthers, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)


You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.