Another "what is this sound and how did they make it?"

[fishbicycle]

There was a popular effect for awhile in the mid-to-late '60s, then it went away and I haven’t heard it since. It was on Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” and the theme from “Midnight Cowboy”, two that come to mind right off. It’s kind of a percussive effect, and it sounds sort of like a pebble being dropped into water, with a long, trailing decay. It starts at a higher pitch, dips low and as it trails off, the pitch rises. I’ve wondered if it was done on a muted guitar string, through some effects pedal. But I’ve worked with hundreds of guitarists and their pedals, and nobody knows what it was or how to reproduce it.

Anybody?

[JohnBckWLD]

I hear it on the right channel Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You at 18 seconds in and every 4 1/2 seconds thereafter for a while, but I don’t hear it on Harry Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talkin even once (that could be because RCA’s digital sound quality is notoriously crappy). Though I have no idea what that sound is or how it’s made - I have a hunch it’s a Phil Spector ‘Wall of Sound’ creation.

[fishbicycle]

OK, that’s the sound I was referring to, on the Valli record. But it’s on the instrumental theme from “Midnight Cowboy,” not on “Everybody’s Talkin’”. I’m probably remembering the Ferrante & Teicher version, which made the charts. I am pretty sure that Phil Spector had nothing to do with either of these records!

[JohnBckWLD]

My initial mention of Spector was cuz I’m still rattling my brain thinking he used the effect prior to whoever played guitar for Valli in 1967 or Ferrante & Teicher’s Midnight Cowboy muzak in 1970. According to Space Age Pop a guy named Vinnie Bell did the ‘watery guitar’ FX.

Vinnie Bell will go down in musical history as the inventor of the “watery” guitar sound that was a big fad in instrumental recordings of the late 1960s. Used most prominently on Ferrante and Teicher’s 1969 Top Ten cover of the theme to “Midnight Cowboy,” the effect became perhaps the most-copied technique among guitarists until the wah-wah pedal became standard equipment in the 1970s. Actually, Bell can probably take credit for the wah-wah pedal, too, as there is evidence that he built them as far back as the early 1950s. Constantly experimenting with home-made electronic devices to modify or distort electric guitar effects, Bell played on somewhere around a gazillion studio sessions in New York and Los Angeles throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

[fishbicycle]

Wow, thanks for that info! Now if they’d only said what it was!

So close, yet so far.

[modular]

Most likely, something drenched in reverb. The amps and reverb machines from that era were ‘spring’ reverbs, as they had springs in them. One of the cool sounds you can get from this is shaking the amp, and making the spring ‘rattle’ making an echoey reverby sound. I haven’t heard the song you are referring to, but Phil Spector was a highly innovative producer who loved the reverb on everything…so I’m just taking a stab.

About 10 or so years ago they sold these things that were long cardboard tubes with plastic endcaps and a stretched slinky inside. You plucked the slinky through a hole and it gave an echoey space sound. Thats sort of the same sound if you know what I am referring to.