Irregular writings
May 2012
I am by nature a contrarian and a cheapskate. If I had tens of thousands of dollars to throw about I would not buy a guitar and an amp. I would buy a car or something. Fix something in my house.
Basically I’m a singer. For the first couple of decades as a performer I liked to stand there at the mic and sing. I didn’t want to be stuffing around with a guitar. In the Moodists, Steve Miller had a Fender twin and Mick Turner had a small Marshall combo. They were pretty intuitive as to what they played. Somehow we arranged our one chord boogies by ear.
The Moodists were operating in the post punk scene. Guitar heroes were few. These were ours: Johnny Thunders, Steve Jones, Keith Levene, Tom Verlaine, Robert Quine, Lou Reed, Poison Ivy, Bryan Gregory, Kid Congo, Rowland Howard.
Later, after the Moodists, I wanted to be a singer songwriter in a 70s kind of way as that was the music I was tuning into. That’s what I’ve done ever since. I wrote songs on an acoustic guitar but usually turned them over to my band, which pretty much always had a piano, bass, guitar and drums. The guitar was always pretty trebly and clean and played with the piano. The guitar didn’t have to be the central part of the sound. We always had the vocals and the rhythm section front and square. Influences from R&B.
I had an acoustic guitar I bought from Robert Forster from the Go-Betweens. Twenty pounds it cost me. Some time in the late 80s I started to do some acoustic shows. The beginning of the vogue for all things “unplugged”. I bought some crappy Ovation style copy from Dean Street in London. Scratched out some performances that way. It was just a cheap way to get around.
Some time in the late 90s, after the Coral Snakes period, I started to play electric guitar, and got myself a Harmony semi acoustic. During this period we had started to use a lot of harmony singing and the sound on stage had to be controlled. The volume of the guitar is always an issue with lots of open mics around, so we were always wanting the guitar amp to be at a lower volume.
I had started to think hard about textures and sound and production and wanted to get a small combo with no piano and clean sounding guitars. A beat group. Stuart Perera played guitar, a left handed solid body Rickenbacker. He put it through a Laney combo and still does. I liked it all pretty loose. Low volume, loud lead vocal, harmonies.
When I was a kid I loved those dudes like Hound Dog Taylor and they all had the cheapest gear. Punk bands like the Buzzcocks proudly had Tesco (supermarket) guitars and the Subway Sect played Fender Squires. I always tune out when people start to rave about “warm valve sounds”. I know, from experience, that it’s all true but there are other sounds. I mean Neil Young and The Foo Fighters might record on tape and the like but they are millionaires. End of story.
The Moodists did a reunion gig in 2005 and the young rock sound engineer was telling our guitarist, who had his own sound and was an original gangster, to “dial some mids in”. I had to tell the young cat that the ideal sound was not always Bon Jovi or Aerosmith, this was the sound we had. Steve turned all the treble on his amp up and there it was – that spindly, loud, reverbed-out Fender twin sound. The kid put his earplugs in.
I’d been putting out my own albums for more than 20 years in between Moodists shows. By now I had some other references for guitar sounds that I loved. Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen, John Cippolina, Ike Turner, Gatemouth Brown, Grant Green, Duane Allman, Ed King. Lots of people. American rock and jazz.
So that’s where my attitude towards the sound I was looking for came in. I can’t wipe all that away from my sensibility. That’s how I ended up buying a $120 solid state Fender combo amp from eBay. The amp had a beautiful clean sound which is what I wanted. Only it was piercingly loud and trebley. The volume was at “1” and it was overpowering.
I became obsessed with building my own sound and scoured the online guitar forums on different subjects. Needless to say, guitar folk love to talk. All continually searching for their own sound, or one somebody else had perfected. I ventured into the world of online opinion and critiquing of the electric guitar experience. The language was pretty amazing – occasionally. I came across the terms “sag” and “bloom”. Using a valve amp, there is a kind of power compression when a note is hit hard and the amp can’t respond straight away. Being valves, they behave differently to solid state circuits. The power “sags” and then gathers and “blooms”, becoming louder and more resonant.
Sag and Bloom. Like a couple of Jewish entertainment lawyers. I was reading this stuff and almost getting it. Then I had to investigate as the Janglebox was very noisy being plugged into mains power. I learned that people preferred batteries in the studio for a better sound but mains power at gigs where reliability had to be uppermost. The sound was better with batteries. New batteries? Well with that question a new rabbit hole appeared when a fellow opined that the “sweetest” sound he’d ever heard was when he used batteries that were just about to run out. Carbon batteries too, whatever they were. I left the building at this stage, happy with the sound I had been able to chase down, ready to go and play and record. Guitar and combo amp still pretty much weighing in the same. Leaving them to all their endless talk.
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