Ghost of Electricity

did a bit of listening and looking for this and would only go so far as to say it may indeed be the prunes and custard- but it's hard to tell as there does seem to be a rhodes or some other keys doubling the part. I do think i hear some ring-modulationy thing going on in there though, in the same way that the p& c has some ring-modulatory thing to go with the overdrive. Am I making any sense at all?

Anyway, i haven't seen a new pic of Jeff's board in a while. Anyone have one?

And finally, welcome to VC (from a fellow newbie)

Charles Manson? (Damaged? unquestionably. Shut in? well, locked up... Cult? obviously. Musician? Wanted to be.)

you beat me to Nigel, moe

forgive the ignorance.. is this when you plug into both channels of your amp simultaneously? i've just never heard this term before.

Oh, ship won't you please come in!

effects blow.

No, not necessarily. But when used as crutches, yes, they can. (oops, ain't i guilty of this myself sometimes?)

Some women are drop dead gorgeous when you lay eyes on them, but when you try talking to them they suddenly don't look so good. Other women you don't notice at first but after a conversation you realize "hey!" Of course there are the ones who don't look so good and just get worse when they start talking, and ever so rarely there are the ones that you do notice and when engaged in conversation get even better.

Records are more or less the same way, and the ones that belong in this fourth group are the ones we take with us, the ones we don't actually need because we can press "play" in our heads and there it is. For me, this "short list" includes "Velvet Underground and Nico," The Jayhawks' "Hollywood Town Hall," Dylan's "Blood on The Tracks" disc 1 of "Being There" (I lost disc two about a week after i got and didn't have the occasion to hear it again until years after disc one was written all over the sinews of my heart). Anything which I have to jump up to look through the shelf for obviously does not really belong there.

I guess I'm not original in that "Rain" was the first to pop into my head too.

looks pretty yummy. what kind of pickups are those?

I think he sign papers to formalize his nominees for cabinet positions but i seem to remember reading a rumor that he was going to sign some presidential decrees to having to do with some of the no-brainers like stem cell research

I'll say it too: FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

i love the name of this thread - it should be an album title, cover done by H.A. Rey

so i've never played a lap steel before but i'm thinking about breaking the ice with one of the cheap models i've seen on ebay. The SX looks most enticing. anyone tried it or any of the others out there?

If you find it, let us know. Like most players I am still looking for the "sound" which for me would be the sustain of a highly distorted amp (for leads) with the clarity to be able to play a diminished chord without it sounding like a complete mess. SRV had an amazing sound. That guitar just screamed but sounded so clean for rhythms and chord work.

I've read lots of reviews by people who swear by the BBE sonic stomp, and while from what i've seen it works better on bass it might be something that interests you moss. youtube has plenty of demos.

most of it has already been said, but i also wanted to ask about the type of guitar. Hollowbodies or semi-hollowbodies can give a bit of depth too. And tweaking the right amount of reverb can help.

A lot of things will make good sounds if you put a little effect on it and combine them. When my band was working on an album, I had some time alone with all of the equipment and added effects to some of the songs. My best one was when I tried to imitate the sound of an airplane taking off. I didn't use a sample because I wanted it to sound organic and I didn't want it to sound exactly like an airplane.

 

First I took a lap steel and plugged it through every overdrive and distortion I could find, then into this little gritty amp that had a real dirty sound when you turned the gain all the way up. I put it on the floor, and when I turned the amp on it was literally shaking and kind of bouncing, it was just on the verge of some really bad feedback. I recorded the sound of taking a slide and running it slowly from the bottom of the neck all the way to the top. This gave a loud slowly rising pitch.

 

For a rumbling sound a took a little cheap practice amp with spring reverb, and turned the reverb all the way up. I aimed a mic at the floor and threw the amp to the ground to get this loud rumbling sound.

 

Next a took the electric razor again and rubbed it against an empty bottle of Labatt Blue. It made this fast clicking noise. I ran that through a phaser.

 

The final piece was an acoustice guitar. The part in the song this was in was over a D7 chord so I tuned the guitar to an open D7 and gave it one loud strum. I processed this by having it play back backwards.

Atta boy, mfwahl! I think you've got it about right- not imitating but mucking about and finding your own way. I'd love to hear a clip of that.

also check out IATTBYH- i seem to remember a bit with Jay taking an electric screwdriver or egg beater or milk foamer to the guitar strings at one point.

For an nterview with Jim O'Rourke talking about some of the strange YHF sounds click here

R.E.M. "Life's Rich Pageant" --I don't want toadmit to you what i had listenex to before that.

Velvet Underground and Nico- I heard this and the world seemed to be a bigger place full of possibilities.

And then there's this from an old blog of mine:

About 20 years ago, just after my older brother got his drivers license, we got permission to take the 78 Brown Caprice Classic my father had bought from his father out for a ride on condition that we had it back by three oclock on the dot, no exceptions, ifs ands or buts. And while we wanted to make the most out of this new, strange freedom, we didnt want to endanger our chances of letting it happen again. So we were cutting it close, taking it down to the wire and planning to pull into the driveway at the stroke of three.

About a block and half left to go and a man with a strange rhaspy voice came on the radio singing a simple 3 chord acoustic song which seemed to have a direct line to somewhere inside, expressing an emotion that, as a thirteen year old, I wouldnt have experienced personally yet, but which was familiar to me nonetheless.

The dashboard clock said we could still drive around the block and make it in time. We came to our driveway and rolled past it, so riveted by the wonderful new sounds that we didnt think whether or not mom was peeking out the window in anticipation of us.

And though it was not a road song, we learned what a joy it could be to simply drive and listen, because we drive we had to, five or six more times around that block, in order to make it to the end of that record which ran for more than five minutes.

We pulled into the driveway intuitively sensing that the harmonica solo was leading us to the end. There we put that old chevy in park and waited to hear the WXRT d.j. deliver the information we were hoping he would: Bob Dylan, Shelter from the Storm.

And somehow the storm with mom was also avoided, or at least forgotten next to the importance of the musical epiphany just experienced.

10 ALBUMS FOR 1 CENT is just too good an offer for a penniless-but-one teenager to pass up. The crafty folks at Columbia Records and Tapes were banking on the fact that the fine print saying regular club price would be lost on the would-be club member. And they were right.

Choosing ten records for a someone who knows little about music can be a daunting task. You have to rely on recommendations from friends who know equally little about music, judge a record by its cover, and employ similar dubious methods. Which lead you many bad choices.

Mercifully time has not left intact in my memory the titles of all ten vynil l.p.s that my brother and I chose. I do remember some: ABBA Greatest Hits, Grease Broadway Soundtrack (we were misled to believing it was the film soundtrack. Imagine the disappointment at not seeing Olivia Newton Johns face plastered across the cover and not hearing the word tit in Greased Lightning. The bastards tricked us) Billy Joel Glass Houses. And then there was Bob Dylan Blood on the Tracks, the only one of the ten that I still listen to all these years later.

The record still impresses me every time I sit down and give it a good honest listen. With my adult ear I can hear nuances that were lost on me when I first listened to it: the likelihood that tracks 2, 5, 9 and 10 were likely from different sessions than the others, the open tuning on Shelter from the Storm, the organ on Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts which works despite being slightly out of tune. With every serious listen there are more of these subtleties.

Lastly, there is the lyrical artistry which on this record alone justifies Dylans nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature.

Mr. Robert Alan Zimmerman has never liked talking much about himself. Shunning interviews and writing an autobiography which, though it does paint fascinating pictures of various eras, doesnt bring you all that much closer to the man himself.

On Blood on the Tracks he often tells his stories in the third person, or assumes a personality as he sings in the first person, but we are not fooled: the record is about the painful breakup with his wife. It is the cagey master poet at his most personal, most eloquent, and most painfully beautiful.

Yeah, I'm just wondering how that would work.

if you ask me to dream, i'll dream

my band:

Glenn Kotche - Drums, etc

Brian Ritchie - Bass

Chet Atkins - Guitar

Bela Fleck - Banjo

Dick Dale - Guitar

Horn Section:

Miles Davis - trumpet

Charlie Parker - saxophone

[taking applications for trombone]

side project band:

Ken Coomer - drums

Max Johnston - banjo, fiddle, mandolin

Jay Bennett - guitar, keys

Leroy Bach - guiat, keys

Brian Henneman - guitar

which means i guess i have to learn to play bass

I think the last Uncle Tupelo (Anodyne) would be a good one- including the breakup of the band

for music:

Beatles "Revolution"

R.E.M. "The end of the world as we know it "

Rolling Stones "Sympathy for the Devil"

The Jayhawks "Take me with you (when you go)"

Beck "Loser"

for first lines:

Bob Dylan "Queen Jane Approximately," (etc.)

Son Volt "Tear-Stained Eye"

Galaxie 500

Spacemen 3

Half Japanese (do fractions count?)

if you drive to work, take a different route. Or better yet walk. If you like your peanut butter creamy, buy chunky. if you write on guitar, try plunking some notes on the piano. call up someone you've lost touch with. get up and hour earlier. grow a moustache. listen to chinese traditional music. cross the tracks. go buy a short you don't like and then wear it. change your level of personal hygeine. perform random acts of kindness to complete strangers. experiment with paper clips. buy a goldfish. play games with salt. seek and destroy your routines. establish new ones and then destroy them too.