"I'll tell you a really cool trip: Go back and take a cassette, nobody fucks with cassettes any more but you can get some really, really cool distortion effects from cassettes. You take a piece of music, record it on to a cassette, and then distort the shit out of it, and then rerecord that again. That’s a different sound as if you were to go in and put a plug-in on it that had an effect. You are not going to get the same sound. There is a warmth to that distortion that’s there, there is a certain amount of enjoyment that you are going to listen to when you hear that. That’s the reason why rock 'n' roll is not doing very well right now as a music because the compression techniques are not the same."
And then, a mere 10 hours later, I'm reading the wikipedia page on that 1968 song "Jumpin' Jack Flash," by that band the Rolling Stones, from a time when rock'n'roll was doing pretty well. Keith Richards says this about how the song was recorded:
"I used a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic tuned to open D, six string. Open D or open E, which is the same thing - same intervals - but it would be slackened down some for D. Then there was a capo on it, to get that really tight sound. And there was another guitar over the top of that, but tuned to Nashville tuning. I learned that from somebody in George Jones' band in San Antonio in 1964. The high-strung guitar was an acoustic, too. Both acoustics were put through a Philips cassette recorder. Just jam the mic right in the guitar and play it back through an extension speaker."
2 comments:
Also true of Street Fighting Man, as I recall, and perhaps an even better example of the awesomeness of tape compression.
Yeah, Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed is when they really got into it... I'm also reading this book called "Rolling Stones and the Making of Let it Bleed" by Sean Egan where George Chkiantz talks about recording the harmonica on "Gimme Shelter": "The harp's magic ingredient was using the distortion caused by overdriving an old Dynacord tape loop machine, then through other devices like limiters, etc."
The book also talks about Keith waiting to do the guitar parts on "Gimme Shelter" only when these certain crappy Triumph brand amps were about to overheat... the display lights had to be dimming, about to blow, before they sounded good. Which reminds me of Hank Shocklee, also in that video, talking about getting a good sound from some drum machine only by unplugging the line out halfway, and so on...
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