Tonefiend Forum

How do you get your prettiest and ugliest tones? Distortion addicts, do you prefer cranked stacks or pedals for your dirt, and why? Clean freaks, are you into complicated stereo-processed rack-rigs or old-school combo amps? Do you get nervous when you have/haven't got a pedal board at your feet? Do you approach getting your sounds from a guitar-centric or amp/effects-centric perspective, or (more likely) some combination of both? Do you quest after an icon's sound or have you sought out your signature tones? How has that journey played out for you?

Rat into Compressor is a pretty good start for that Fripp/Heroes tone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv1g4jUWZ4w
(Cannot get this one to embed. Drag. Click through)

My comp is an Ibanez CP-5 Soundtank, a Dynacomp derivative. I keep on vacillating on what sort of time or modulation effect to add to approach that multiple-takes-mixed sound and I think I may be on to something messing with the multi-tap delay on my Magic Stomp at some pretty short delay times.

Then again, you can always just re-imagine a great song:

Quote from joe on August 18, 2012, 15:15
haha! I use an EBow — but Robert insists he did not! But yeah, it's pretty easy to get adequate sustain for the phrase without the EBow.

It was his Les Paul Black Beauty which is a remrkable guitar.The Black Beauty's did not have a maple cap on the mahogant body but it did have the long tenon neck joint which makes a huge diffrence in sustain. When i saw him do the Frppertronics tour in the late 70's i was sitting in a folding chair so close to Robert I could tap notes on the neck of his guitar, I could feel the resonance of the guitar physically, he played at a volume you could talk over but still had the near infinite sustain he is noted for, he had a Foxtone fuzz/wah as pretty much his only pedal. He did not need an E-bow the guitar just sang all by itself. That concert on a Sunday afternoon at 2:00PM in a former synagogue in Washington DC, is one of my all time favorite shows. there was free coffee, tea and cookies in the lobby for all to partake off, eating cookies with Robert Fripp was great to say the least.
Much as I love E-bows the company tended to overstate their user. they have ads with many players listed but some like Eugene Chadbourne claim to never have used an E-bow. But I'll forgive them for that as they are great devices (I've worn out a couple over the years). I've used an E-bow (possibly to excess) for 25 plus years.

Quote from joe on August 19, 2012, 12:00
Two of my favorite f'ed-up tones were weird accidents. Back when I worked at Guitar Player, I got a review model of a "Jimi Hendrix Fuzz," an awful little pseudo Fuzz Face. Even better, the review model was broken — it emitted only a sad sputter. Naturally, I bought it, and it was my main fuzz on To Bring You My Love. It got lost on tour — but by that time, the boutiquers were starting to come up with fuzzes that made that sound on purpose. You can add that "broken" mod to any fuzz by adding a pot that trims the voltage going to the transistors' collectors.

An even weirder one was the mutant fuzz-trem I used on the Eels song "Agony." I had a Flip tremolo, a really lush-sounding tube-powered unit that requires AC power. But if you unplug the power supply, you get the violent fuzz sound heard on the track. I have no idea how or why this works, but it does. If anyone here can explain why it works, well, I'm all ears. 🙂

I did a post and demo on the Jimi Hendrix fuzz! It's awesomely awful, and most of my nastiest recorded tones are made with it. Here's a link to the article:
https://inspireformation.blogspot.ca/2012/06/dunlop-jimi-hendrix-jh-2-fuzz.html

I've also begun to get interested in the possibilities offered by the Zinky Smokey amps; toothy, unrefined and unapologetically gonzo, particularly through an external cab.

I tried a Zinky Supro at NAMM. I was deeply impressed. He's one of the real mad geniuses of the modern amp age. I still think his Vibro-King is the best-sounding Fender of the modern era.