funny_polymath
Fractal Fanatic
Any advice? I know he uses a Fender Deluxe close to meltdown, but any ideas most welcome. I am not really looking to 'clone' this sound, just get into the same general zone. Thanks.
Seriously? Wow. So let me make sure I understand this correctly- Guitar->deluxe->mic->magnatone->mic->PA? So he sort of sends it through two separate amps in a serial fashion? He must've been stoned when he came up with that! But hey, he's Neil Young, and I'm a high school science teacher, so what do I know about how he sets up...The deluxe is mic'ed and the output of that goes into a Magnatone amp. That amp is mic'ed and goes into a small PA and onstage PA cabinets.
A friend joked about how could he get an uglier sound?
Playing around with a Ring modulator one day I played that infamous riff and was convinced that is close to the raunchy distortion sound. Give it a try
Seriously? Wow. So let me make sure I understand this correctly- Guitar->deluxe->mic->magnatone->mic->PA? So he sort of sends it through two separate amps in a serial fashion? He must've been stoned when he came up with that! But hey, he's Neil Young, and I'm a high school science teacher, so what do I know about how he sets up...
Rust Never Sleeps was most likely the Deluxe turned up to meltdown, but I think for much of the Freedom album, including Rockin' in the Free World, he was using a Marshall of some kind. The fact that they sound similar has more to do with Neil Young than any particular gear.
I've actually gotten a tolerably good trashy Neil Young-esque sound with the '59 Bassguy model. The most important thing is to play like you absolutely do not give a f**k.
You have to allow yourself to be transfixed, and become a conduit for a supremely primal energy.
I guess the thing that surprises me most is that here, in this forum, where we have a majority of truly gifted guitar players, and some out-and-out guitar gods, why would Neil be singled out as someone to emulate/model/copy/tonally clone/be an inspiration/etc. ? As if it's not already obvious, I don't get it.
I could be wrong, but I think there is also a whole lot of guitar/amp interaction going on there; the kind of thing you get when you are standing in a room with a ridiculously loud amp. This is not going to happen tracking direct and monitoring with headphones. It's a subtle part of the sound to be sure, but if you are looking for that "last 10%" you might want to try splitting your signal off to a super loud amp and blasting it right at your guitar as you track. Don't damage your hearing though!
Boy - I'll probably start (another) flame war here - albeit without meaning toH - I'm a child of the 60's rock era, and Neil was a pivotal part of that. However, there are two artists that I go out of my way to avoid listening to for ACADEMIC reasons: Neil Young and Jimmy Vaughn. I am actually afraid that if I listen to these gents that I may pick up some of their characteristics/stylings subconsciously. I find that Neil is the owner of the one-note-solo realm, and that Jimmy Vaughn is so simple that it's hard to believe that he's taking it seriously. I think both of them should be collared by the 'tone police'. At least Jimmy seems to bend and intonate his notes properly. These guys both remind me of the old Playboy music polls, where Eric Clapton always won best guitarist (did Neil also win?), Billy Preston won best keyboard player, etc. simply because of name recognition and the low musical IQ of the general readership.
Oddly (to me), John Lennon and others loved him. Go figure. Could he sing? With CSNY certainly! With his solo work I tend to hear an imaginary Randy Jackson in my head going "it's pretty pitchy". Could he play? Well 'Harvest' and other albums showed that he was FUNCTIONAL on an acoustic. So was Cobain, sort of, but that's a separate can-o-worms.
I guess the thing that surprises me most is that here, in this forum, where we have a majority of truly gifted guitar players, and some out-and-out guitar gods, why would Neil be singled out as someone to emulate/model/copy/tonally clone/be an inspiration/etc. ? As if it's not already obvious, I don't get it.
Ha! I vividly remember being at a show where I said something like, "Neil Young is my hero!" and a guy I knew turned to me and said, "But... you play guitar so well...?"
It's not for everybody, but both Young's tone and playing style are viscerally satisfying to me. I can listen to and appreciate Eric Johnson or Marty Friedman or George Benson or whoever on some kind of intellectual level, but Neil Young's playing is a gut punch. It bypasses all that 13-over-8 polyrhythm played over a Cdim5flat9 cerebral stuff and hits me emotionally right where it hurts. I enjoy it on a totally different level. If anything I ever played could be as satisfying as the one-note guitar solo in Cinnamon Girl, or the horrifyingly ugly stuff at the end of Southern Man, I'd die happy. I like Billy Corgan for some of the same reasons.
I think if somebody playing simply indicates to you that "it's hard to believe that he's taking it seriously," there's just a broad swathe of music that doesn't speak to you. Nothing wrong with that. For me, though, there are times when simple and even ugly can say some things better than any amount of technical wizardry.
Put another way, I don't look at a Picasso and chide the artist for having screwed-up proportions in his figures. The value of that art is appreciated along an entirely different axis than, say, hyperrealism.