How To Recreate Classic Sounds - A Thread

Xpost.

Fantastic, thanks for the that.

examples:

You Never Give Me Your Money
It Don't Come Easy
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You hear it a lot on Abbey Road and Ram. I'm guessing they had a specific pedal that McCartney and Harrison used, but I'm wondering what it was and how to duplicate that sound with contemporary effects/pedals.

lots of divergent opinions but plenty of tricks to try out...

Along with the Beatles guitar-flange, I was wondering the other day about a similar Beatlesque effect on vocal harmonies, used all the time and obviously screaming 60s-pop-psych -- kind of like reverb that sucks out into a bubbly flange/phase effect? "Bluejay Way" would be one example, maybe, and then look to the modern day for loads of bands using it as an obvious 60s signifier (e.g. Boo Radleys on "White Noise Revisited" and even Why? on one new-album song).

Cymbals are usually played more dynamically than drums, and that's pretty important to how the groove sounds. Compression smoothes out the volume peaks, which is basically what a crash cymbal IS, so the cymbals can end up sounding weird or fake.

not neccessarily. i'd stick to the rule of thumb about not overdoing any dynamic effect to tape because you may need to trade it off with something else in the sound spectrum come mix time - unless you're going for a very specific thing or are very experienced with types of compression it's probably best to use it across the board in a minimal, transparent fashion during tracking. same with eq.

i've seen front of house engineers use those high freqs to define how hard they hit compressors on the master outs - it sounds awesome. very loud very heavy but defined also.

try to get a good level to tape. it's much easier for us dorks to work with.

also the better or more characterful the flavours that artiste brings in to yay session = the funkier more original thing you'll get out of it. ie.mic him + the whole schtick through the tandy as well - of course!

this is more of an answer to moley's thread but fuck.

they were cool but one of the older guys collars me as i'm staggering out the door with armfuls of rack gear and says 'remember - all this won't make your music any better.' wise words - it's just a bunch of inanimate stuff. there are no original idea generating buttons.

creativity is a perverse beast. if you sit it in the corner of the room while you stare at it and bunch of stuff for days/weeks/months/years on end it goes on strike. long strike. that's the fucker between art and commerce, that Top Tunes Take Time but the market doesn't have time. it's also the point where you work out whether you're in it for the music or the ca$h money. eventually you figure that a lot of the best stuff is done away from the machines which isn't a great surprise. the human brain is the equivalent of an imaginative supercomputer. so you go back to the machines to realise the idea you had.

play yr riff gently bending it up and down with the whammy, no more than a few microtones, then overdub it doing same

Haha yes indeed

btw, I'm moley/colin, but I changed my name. Ratty was my nickname at school.

i'm on top of an upgrade myself and my warning bells are going b/c of the last one (1997 too). i spent so long on the learning curve with the new gear then that i lost a crucial amount of time and creative impetus and disappeared up my own arse for a long time, so i'm wary of that. the solution is to buy a cassette 4-track off a mate which not only sounds gorgeous but also is my natural home so i can keep stuff rolling away from the main hub until such time as i'm sufficiently fluid on the new system to marry everything up. 4 tracks make me FOCUS ON THE MATERIAL rather than on the sonics and editing processes needed to take an idea to it's completion. i don’t get exhausted by option anxiety that way.

that said the sonic sides of technology are amazing :) i was dicking about last night and was astounded to hear how similar blockfish plug (cost: £zipnichenothing) was sat next to my beloved old joemeek vc1 (cost £450). both optos, both great for dynamic saturation guitars esp. i wouldn't swap my joemeeek for the world but wow fuck.

but no multi-tracking gear for now which is a pain. whatever works for you though with your gear. creatively you’re trying to get to a place where you’re not getting pulled in 15 directions at once – at least i am. and don’t be too hard on your mates. i’ll hazard i’m at last 10 years older than them and have had my share of peaks and troughs to get to my *ahem* enlightened perspective. Don’t take too much notice of me. i may be in a good place now but given the opportunity I’m as much of a tedious money-grabbing little tyke as the next person.

Not to un-derail the thread, but I wonder if this poster realizes that "super saturated distortion" is so nebulous as to mean basically nothing.

Funny thing is "poor man's MBV tone" is kinda ridiculous considering that the stuff actually used on the recordings isn't all that expensive as guitar gear goes.

Dump this generic "super saturatedn distortion" stuff... MBV was using a Boss Heavy Metal pedal from all accounts I've heard.

Now, back to the derail: My problem with getting new gear is that I have a tendency to use it as a way to procrastinate. i.e. Can't record this idea until I have X because X is necessary to get whatever sound I think I simply must get. I don't do it as much as I used to for a couple reasons, not the least of which is that I just know when I've started to slip into that mode again, but it's still something I have to watch for.

There are, however, some items I've purchased over the years that had short learning curves and greatly sped up the process of creation. Curiously, almost all of them are controllers or other automated assistants rather than effects units or compressors.

I have everything in the studio running through a CM Labs 64 automated patchbay now. The learning curve on that guy is quick because it's very straightforward, and after I spent a few hours setting everything up and mapping everything out the way you would with any patchbay, I was at a point where I can route any output to any input by pressing a couple buttons.

All signal level matching is memorized (for the few items I've got that run at -10 instead of +4), and my most common routing options are universally saved as single presets. In the end it lets me run my hardware units just about as easily as dropping a plug-in into software. It really has made it much easier to just plug in a mic or an instrument and go... in fact it's easier for me now to sit down and record than it was when I was just plunking the 4 track Tascam down in the garage.

I know that sounds like an ad for CM Labs or something, but really I'm just impressed by how much that one piece has made my studio easier to use, and it's a great example of a place where gear actually aids the creative process by being easy to use and actually useful.

he, i totally made up 'dynamic saturation' this afternoon too. by it i meant that when you run things into the red on analog tape you get a lovely saturation effect which (in my case usually) limits too hard. with an opto it doesn't flatline, or at least i can control it better so it kind of breathes and lurches. feels like it increases the dynamic range of the source which is weird. i'm told this is to do with transients being allowed through with fast release times and such. i'm not big on the science but it sounds nice.

i heard MBV also used a lot of SPX90 on loveless

from my (admittedly limited) experience, you can 'fake' that woozy mbv tone by using a lot of distortion and subtle microtonal variation. you know when you bend two strings so they're microtones apart, it generates all sorts of crazy buzzy-vibrating harmonics and stuff, so if you overdub two distorted power chords you're whammying, that distorto-micrtonal-harmonicism effect is increased, and it, uh, sounds cool? and big? even if that's not what shields was doing (but i do believe that he did use the tremelo on his jazz master or a digitech whammy to get achieve microtonal variation) it still sounds cool!
i remember reading fenessz talking about overdubbing eight notes played on guitar, each microtones apart, to get some of his sounds, that sort of vibrating-hazy effect.

if i knew more about physics i could talk about these overtones ... similar to what i think sonny sharrock was going for when he used distortion on his guitar. a former sax player stymied by asthma, he was inspired by coltrane's use of those harmonic overtoney things and sought to recreate this on the guitar via distortion.

Also, re: "lots of distortion, or overdrive, fuzz, whatever"... well... which is it? They are three very different things. You get different overtones with each as well.

In fact the reason the power chord sounds so good with distortion is because with hard clipping you get a very pronounced artificial harmonic right between any two notes played. Thus, play the power chord (a 5th), and you get the major third popping up out of the distortion, so you're essentially playing a major chord in standard voicing. The physics of creating notes exactly between every note played when there's a lot of distortion is also why a true hard-clipping distortion pedal sounds like shit when you try to play a full chord through it. (Because think about it... Say you're playing 6 notes. You're creating an extra note between every two of them, so you're actually playing a whole lot of notes there. That's why it will sound like atonal mud. Because at that point, that's pretty much what it is.)

Overdrive (soft clipping) isn't the same thing and doesn't have the same effect, which is why an overdrive pedal can often make your playing still sound musical with full chords.

To add further confusion, many pedals are named incorrectly. e.g. the MXR Distortion+ is a soft clipping device. Which is to say it's really an overdrive pedal in the strict sense. I'm oversimplifying for explanation's sake, because there are circuits that sort of behave as both at different places, but I don't think I've simplified to the point of actually being incorrect.

"Microtonal variation" could mean a lot of stuff too. When you get down to it, microtonal variation is what a chorus pedal is doing using delay lines.

Shieids definitely uses the vibrato bar to do a lot of that wavy stuff. He's not the only one who does it either. e.g. Listen to Built to Spill, and you'll hear Doug doing it all over the place as well.

if you listen to the old 7"'s it sounds like the horns and b.v.'s are distorting quite hard. the vocal is often left dry-ish.

Regarding reverb, another Motown innovation was to have more reverb on the music than on the vocal. There were three custom built reverberation chambers at Motown - all used during a mix - unheard of in those days. Again today a typical control room today has 4-8 (or more) effects devices for reverb (and other effects).

that sounds like a neat trick from here:

http://www.recordinginstitute.com/R2KREQ/excomp.htm

so go for some room and spring verbs and roll the HF off i would guess.

they say to do that split w/ the vocal channel leave the dry one alone and compress the bejesus out of the other one and crank the high eq's on it.

finally i would play around with an old school style compressor on the master outs.

and martin, perhaps one could experiment with using od, dist or fuzz to explore different yet similar harmonic effects as opposed to just aping one 'classic sound'. to the recording wizard those are 'very different things' but not to the lay ear as it were. glad to see the i make music board is just as pedantic as ilm ;-D

And glide guitar.

way, way xpost

To a creative year! To the nines!

Re Robin Guthrie's guitar tone, yes there is a Total Guitar article online somewhere where the patron saint of shoegaze discusses his FX preferences eg using delays rather than reverb (which he apparently doesn't like the sound of on guitars!) and harmonizers (Eventide, baby) instead of choruses, but it's still pretty easy to get a generic Guthrie tone with just chorus, distortion, reverb and a bit of delay. I think having a strat style guitar with active, trebly pickups is also a good idea, but at the end of the day the guy has every FX pedal under the sun and was coked to the nines when he recorded most of the classic Cocteaus material so perhaps we'll never know.

I know they always say they didn't use synths, but there MUST be some synths on HOLV at the very least.

Nothing you didn't know already of course. But what I really, really want to know is how to record guitar feedback the way Guthrie did eg at the climax of "Blue Bell Knoll" - now that's a cool sound. Also, the glissando delay towards the end of 'Evangeline' is an amazing sound which I've managed to approximate with portamento (an underrated 'effect'!) but I'd be very interested to learn how this was actually achieved.

THAT HUGE JOHN BONHAM SOUND!

and

THAT HOLLOW 60's MID RANGY BASS GUITAR SOUND

thanks!

From what I understand, a lot of the bigass Bonham sound was location. Doing shit like cutting the drum track in a castle and the like...

2) 24" - 26" bass drum, no holes, minimal muffling, tuned kinda high

3) I think EQ helps a lot...I'm no expert, but one track I did figure out how to approximate both the crack of the snare and that high-end ring that sounds so awesome on When the Levee Breaks.

4) Maybe close mics mixed with distance mics would help?

1) Damage Manual, 'Sunset Gun'

2) that tune on the Kill Bill soundtrack in Lucy Liu slow-mo walking scene

3) ??

chaki, you got an example of the bass sound you're talking about? I'm betting at least part of the sound in question is also the sound of the preamps and/or compression used. That is, afterall, the era of Fairchilds and some amazing console design.