Okay - just messin’ around to stir the pot a bit - in this thread we have another cool grooves roll call - always good.
But what about songs where you dig the guitar player, the riff, whatever - but the tone of the guitar is awful to your ears?? Here are a few of mine:
Gang of Four,Love Like Anthrax (YouTube of a live performance), featuring Andy Gill on lead ice pick - to be clear: I love this song and GoF, but why does it have to start with a solid minute of feedback on the studio version? And why does it have to be that profoundly strident, I assume digital-awful feedback? This is not old-school, Hendrix-y, Nugent-y swooshes of sound - it peaks like nails on a chalkboard. Ugh.
Prince, Let’s Go Crazy (couldn’t find a link) - why, oh why, does one of the best guitarists around use *that *tone for the lead at the end?? It sounds like he was playing through a blender or something. Sigh.
Pantera, Walk (YouTube link), featuring Dimebag on guitar - in this old thread, I discuss my love for the song but its upside-down arrangement. Dimebag’s tone is the epitome of a metal, scooped-mids tone. I always assumed that the player put more distortion before tone, so zeroed out the mids to reduce feedback - thereby rendering their guitar sound just spongey and yucky.
You’re welcome to disagree - I love all the songs and the guitars are certainly part of that, but I always find myself wondering how the same song would sound with a better guitar tone…do you have any nominees?
Any half-decent guitar song from 80s except for Stevie Ray Vaughn’s and a couple of the Metal acts TBD sound pretty song-ruiningly awful to me these days.
OK, that’s my sweeping generalization for today. I’ll think on it during lunch and try to come up with some good examples. It’s kind of tricky, because some of it wasn’t really the guitarist’s fault so much as the overall production being that sucky 80s thing.
From the 60s, Pictures of Matchstick Men by **Status Quo **had kind of an irritating tone. Ice in the Sun (from the same timeframe) was a much better song and used the same tone.
Fascinating - really? What don’t you like about it? I just love the guitar tone on his version of Who Do You Love…big, a bit of crunch, you hear the hollow body of the guitar, articulate when he plays riffs…good stuff to my ear.
…YMMV and all that…and he can’t sing to save his life.
The guitar solo in Easy by th Commodores. Great song, great solo, and normally I love a classic fuzz sound. But that tone just sounds overproduced, and horribly out of context with the rest of the tune.
Purely a matter of personal taste; I just don’t like that “harsh” (for lack of a better term) distortion. I go more for a “smooth” overdrive sound. For similar reasons I can admire Robert Fripp as a guitarist, but on some of the earlier (or maybe middle) King Crimson stuff I’m like, “Ya likes some distortion, eh Bob?”
Okay - that makes sense. When you take a hollow-bodied ES-295 like Georgie-boy uses and put it through an old Fender amp (my working assumption on his gear), you get a rawer crunch sound that doesn’t have the tight low-end of a Les Paul thru a Marshall classic rock crunch sound…
De gustibus non disputandum (sp?) but, wow, I love that tone, and the same with George Thorogood’s.
I have to agree with the 80s guitar sound. That chorus effect is just awful, and as much as I love 80s music and those guitar riffs, it bothers me that its so ubiquitous in 80s music.
Back to Layla for a sec–the electric original. I think every single guitar tone is totally awful. Every time I hear it I think “I’ll bet those guys hated what the engineer & producer did to the tones to get so many guitars to fit together.” If you listen to each one and try to separate it out of the mix, it’s horrible, but if they each sounded great the mix would be mush.
I’ve always thought John’s (maybe it’s George?) rhythm guitar tone on Revolution was just atrocious. I can’t really explain why, it just grates on my ears.
James’ tone on and Justice for All… while not bad per se, takes a lot away from the sound of the album as a whole. It sucks up every bass frequency in the vicinity, leaving the album sounding really flat and stale. It’s a great example of a tone that sounds great on its own, but does little to help the overall sound of the band. Kind of an inversion NoCoolUserName’s Layla example.
[Blasphemy]I have the same feeling about the soloing in **Steely Dan’**s *Reeling In The Years *(Elliot Randall?). I love the solo itself, but it doesn’t fit the song at the end of the day. I know, that incongruity is part of its appeal, but after that novelty wears off, it sounds like a lead guitarist wanking all over a polite combo. Maybe it would have been better if the combo were less polite. Imagine what that solo would sound like with a Billy GibbonsLa Grange-style rhythm track.[/Blasphemy]
Oh, speaking of Billy Gibbons, there’s a prime example…one of the best tones in rock on their 70s stuff; then using all that fake-ass junk on their 80s stuff.
It’s funny - I was reading something recently - maybe it was a review of the ABB’s stand at The Beacon this year, where Clapton sat in for two nights - and Derek and the Domino’s album was cited in a major publication (might’ve been the NY Times) as “often referred to as the greatest guitar album ever” or something very close to that.
Really? I mean, sure, it is lauded and worthy, but “greatest”?! I wouldn’t even want to try to narrow down “the greatest” and I sure haven’t heard of it described that way as conventional wisdom, along the lines of “Hendrix is the best guitar player” or “the Beatles are the best rock group” or anything like that. Just a bit of an aside.
Anyway - this is a tough one. I didn’t comment on the “out of tune” comments on Duane’s playing up the neck, either. Layla (by this I mean the entire CD - but abbreviating it to LaOALS feels a bit silly…) represents a period where Clapton was switching to Strats (he used Brownie on Layla, I believe) and he was moving away from his bassier, heavier Gibson-generated tone. I also believe most of it was recorded on very small amps - Champs and such. Finally, Clapton seemed to be wanting to bury himself in the mix - figuratively by treating the CD kinda like Sgt. Pepper with a fictional name, and literally by laying down a lot of tracks, playing in a sideman role with Delaney and Bonnie (and Friends!), etc. All of this is a way of saying that Layla was a a big departure; the sound is thick and multi-tracked (oh, and Clapton was in the midst of his heroin addiction, so who knows how much patching together producer and legend Tom Dowd had to do).
It is what it is - the songs endure and the sound is the signature sound of Layla. I prefer his stuff with Cream, but appreciate what is going on here…
As for Duane sounding out of tune - again, YMMV. I hear a guy wailing with emotion and coming up to notes in an interesting way, so I love it, but I can hear where others might not. Kinda like Neil Young’s voice - it suits the material…
I don’t mind Gibbon’s tone in the 80’s backed-by-synthy’s music, but the “backed-by-synthy’s” part I could really, really do without.
I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide is a weird, offbeat tune that has no business sounding as totally awesome as it does - that is some tonal amazingness right there…
I’ll think on it during lunch and try to come up with some good examples. It’s kind of tricky, because some of it wasn’t really the guitarist’s fault so much as the overall production being that sucky 80s thing.