The Watering Hole

I was recently asked to discuss the methods used in the seventies to get that full, fat, guitar sound from the period. As a guitarist during the seventies, I racked my brains and wasted lots of money trying to reproduce these sounds, often with nothing but an amp and stomp boxes. I'd see pictures of guitarists in the studio with a little Fender Princeton or Deluxe sitting by them and think, "He can't have used that peewee to make that monstrous sound!" But they did, although it often wasn't as simple as it looked. It wasn't until I became a recording engineer that I really got a grasp of some of these sounds. I’m going to approach the present discussion from both the guitar system and recording system standpoints, because both influenced what we heard on records. The last thing in the list will be particular artist info. Incidently, this page is updated regularly as I uncover more info.


GUITAR SYSTEM GENERAL NOTES:
The guitar amps of the time only offered medium gain, so the sound wasn’t nearly as saturated as it has become in later decades. Some guitarists created or bought preamps to get a little more gain. We’d use an outboard preamp such as an Electro-Harmonics LPB1 or LPB2 ("a sound like unto a wall of Marshalls") or an MXR MicroAmp to jack up the gain and get more sustain live, but on the recordings, the sounds had lower gain but still sustained. Compression, sometimes to an extreme, was added in the recording signal chain to give the guitars a fatter sound. It gave you a long sustain, but a far different sound from high-gain. A good example of the low-gain, high-compression sound is David Gilmore’s solo from Pink Floyd’s "The Wall Pt.2". While it has singing sustain, you can still hear much of the attack character of his guitar because the gain is moderate. That's a Les Paul recorded directly into the mixing console.

Touch sensitivity was important back then and the "brown zone" of the period has become famous of late. The brown zone is the area of gain in an amp between clean and dirty, right on the ragged edge. "Touch sensitivity" is the amp’s ability to react to the intensity of the players picking by moving from clean to dirty. This also translated into an ability to go from dirty to clean by backing off the guitar’s volume control. Medium-gain amplifiers did this nicely but had a limited total gain palette. Master volume and channel switching amps don’t do this as well, but offer easy switching from really clean to really dirty.

It's important to realize that much of the lead sustain of the period came from flogging tube power amplifiers wide open, not from simply jacking up the input gain. When pushed past their clean reproduction capabilities, power tubes tend to begin compressing the sound and generating musical harmonics. Once past their threshold of distortion, the harder you push them, the less they are able to respond with an increase in volume. Also, as you push the amp, the rectifier tube begins to be unable to keep up as well. You end up with a soft, cushiony sustain being generated. Power tubes generate a more gentle distortion than preamp tubes as well. In the studio, engineers and producers would usually have you flog a smaller amp to get the distorted and compressed sound, but that usually wouldn't do onstage. Of course, our hearing couldn't survive the onslaught very long if you used a large amp, so master volume control was invented to allow a reasonable, if inferior, alternative, and the preamp gain race was on.

Most of you will know this, but I’d better cover it anyway. Humbucking pickups are fatter sounding than single-coil ones. They typically reproduce a full octave less high-end overtones than single-coil pickups, emphasize the midrange more, and have a higher output which drives amps harder. During the ‘70s, DeMarzio began winding hot pickups with higher output but even less high-end. It became the fashion to replace your stock pickups with these. It also was fashionable to raise up the pickups to right underneath the strings, which gave a higher output but also reduced highs. Unfortunately it was also discovered the hard way that it is possible to raise your pickups high enough that their magnetic influence dampens the string’s sustain. The overall feeling of "sweetness" reduces as well.

The seventies was also a period when guitarists had these fantastic tones on record but weren’t able to reproduce them on stage. This is where all the frustrated head-banging on the part of guitarists came in. Entire songs were written around riffs generated within effects combinations which couldn't easily be reproduced onstage with the existing analog effects. Sometimes it was truly a disappointment to hear a great guitarist live, because he couldn’t reproduce the studio sound from which the whole song sprang. I also remember Steve Howe’s and Jimmy Page's early attempts to reproduce some of their stuff involving both acoustic and electric sounds by using a Gibson EDS1275 double-neck 12/6 electric. That was ugly.

Here’s something to remember: A flanger, phaser, or echo applied to a recording of a gained-up guitar sounds entirely different from one used as a stomp-box in the amp’s input chain. Oh boy. It is disappointing to buy an expensive phase-shifter and plug it in before the amp only to find that the effect gets totally lost once you gain up. When applied to a recording in the studio, it swooshes over the entire spectrum of overtones generated by the amp’s distortion for a much more profound effect. When applied in the chain before the gained-up amp, those same overtones obscure the effect. Remember also that flanger, phaser, and chorus effects work best over a broad spectrum of frequencies, so you'll be able to hear them best over a bright guitar's sound.

Echo applied before a gained-up amp dynamically alters the amp's degree of saturation, and thus, its overall sound. For that matter, most stomp boxes alter the EQ, gain, noise floor, and/or impedance of your guitar signal while they are in the circuit. In the seventies, it was normal to build up a huge, wonderful sound via stomp boxes in the guitar-amp chain and then try to add just one more effect, only to have it ruin everything. Very frustrating. One of the few devices which had a positive effect on the sound was the Echoplex tape echo machine. Even with the echo off, it fattened up and smoothed out the sound of your guitar nicely.

So, one of the biggest contributors to the fat sounds was an effects chain applied to the recording. This is where the recording system came in.


RECORDING SYSTEM GENERAL NOTES:
In recording, the ‘70s and late ‘60s saw lots of experimentation with compression. The compressors available at the time were Lang and UREI tube compressors and the onboard compressors on Neve 8000 series consoles. Currently, these units are hoarded like gold. We recently sold one of our 8058 Neve consoles from the facility where I work. Before it could even leave our facility, the various modules and compressors had been parted out to people all over the world. As you increased compression on these units, the high-end became soft and the low-end filled in. Also, a limitation of the old circuits turned out to be a benefit: Tube compressors and the early solid state ones were very "gentle" because they responded fairly slowly, compared to modern ones. It all contributed to a rounder sound.

Another difference from current technique was the nature of recording rooms themselves. While Jimmy Page's practice of playing and recording in naturally ambient rooms and taking advantage of their properties may have formed part of his signature, the typical ‘70s recording was done in an extremely dead room and all ambience was added via acoustic chambers, spring and plate reverbs, tape echo, and early digital delays. All this was in continual flux. A big turning-point album is 1982's "Toto IV", which shows a return to 'live' recording rooms and recordings.

Ambiences: After the surf craze, in most cases, you didn’t hear spring reverb from the guitar amp. Instead, until 1979, most reverb was via reverb rooms with hard walls or either plate or gold-foil reverb systems. A good EMT plate, tweaked for instruments, gave a very dense, fat reverb sound but very little high-end. A pre-delay was sometimes added by running the reverb bus through a tape delay before hitting the reverb. Simply put, pre-delay makes the reverb sound larger but helps prevent it from competing with the main sound.

In 1979, the Lexicon Corporation debuted the model 224, the first really flexible but reasonably affordable digital studio reverb. From that point on came a trend towards the use of brighter and brighter reverbs. The trend peaked in the electronic late ‘80s and was followed by a return to more realistic, darker reverbs from that point on. Probably the brightest were Yamaha’s REV and SPX series of studio reverbs.

Echo: Digital delay made its early debut around 1972. The first generation was both clumsy and noisy. By the way, I worked at the studio that received the first of Lexicon’s second-generation DDL, the "Prime Time," serial #00001. Its flexibility revolutionized delay and was the standard throughout most of the eighties. Before digital delay lines, delay was created with tape decks by recording a sound and playing it back in real time from the tape deck's play head. To get multiple echoes, you mixed part of the deck's output back into the input. Early consoles referred to this as "spin". For different delay times, you changed the deck's speed. As the echo faded off and was regenerated, each pass through the deck cut treble, added bass, increased noise, and increased distortion. Often, electric guitar parts with echo were recorded through an "Echoplex" boxed tape echo machine. Joe Walsh used Echoplexes extensively through the James Gang "Rides Again" album and even played interactively with his. Eighties players

decried the tape echo sound and went for all-digital clean repeats. As it turned out, the tape method actually quite elegantly emulated the natural characteristics of acoustic echo, where multiple passages through air and bounces off irregular surfaces progressively distorted the sound and limited its bandwidth. We’ve gone full circle with this. My modern, inexpensive, and very cool digital delay pedal offers both clean repeats and extensive tape emulation features (bandwidth reduction per iteration, iterative distortion and noise). Nevertheless, I was an idiot when I sold my Echoplex: Even though it was bulky, noisy, and clunky, I still miss its sound. It was one of those effects which made the guitar sound better even when it was bypassed.

How about the effect of tape itself? From the mid-seventies to the early eighties, pop music was recorded at pretty hot levels on analog tape. As you pushed the level on tape, it compressed the sound and began to add third-harmonic distortion. Another factor was at play as well: As soon as the recording was finished, the tape began what was called "high-end relaxation," where the gain and dynamic range of the high-end began to progressively drop off over time. Toward the end of the seventies, they’d rush the tapes from the studio to the mastering engineer, often via courier. There they would have them cut to the master immediately in order to catch the high-end before it sagged. Ever wonder why you bought the first run of an album, wore it out and bought a second, only to find that it sounded inferior to the first? There you go. High-end relaxation. Remember Queen? Their producer, Roy Thomas Baker, recorded all their music on narrow track format Stephens multi-track recorders, deliberately over-modulating the tape, to give the product a hard, gritty edge. These days, when I hear these recordings on CD, they will set my teeth on edge. They were, however, an anomaly and an extreme.

EQs from period consoles had limited abilities. Up until about 1974, console EQs didn’t go above 10k! From there until 1979, they were mostly of the fixed or switched frequency variety, offering maybe twelve frequencies at most. Engineers used outboard graphic EQs to get a little more flexibility. One console manufacturer (Sphere) offered a graphic EQ unit on each input channel. Outboard parametrics weren’t available until about 1975 and you might only have two to four channels available in a studio, unless your budget was huge and you rented. Val Garay, now owner of Record One in L.A. but then the producer and engineer for Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, and Orleans, once related the story of loosing a mix to another engineer around 1973 because the other fellow discovered the high-end EQ on his board before Val did.

One thing that isn’t generally known is the degree to which producers had an impact on the gear used by the artists for recording. For obvious reasons, the artists themselves are reticent to discuss it. However, Tirane Porter, former bassist for the Doobie Brothers, did a Guitar Player interview in which he admitted that Ted Templeman, the Doobie’s producer, even chose his bass strings, in order to create a piano-ish sound. Tirane didn’t particularly like the sound of those strings but Ted used them to get the recordings.

So. What does it all mean? All of the above factors contributed to a sound with lots of sustain but only medium gain and, often, nice articulation on the attack. They also militated for guitar sounds which weren’t horribly hi-fi, even if they sounded wonderful. To get authentic sounds, remember the limitations of the time, and dial them into your setups and recorded sounds. If you want to emulate these sounds, think in terms of the old, medium-gain amps from the period. Also, throughout the signal chain, think tubes, tubes, tubes. Wherever there are tubes, there is a gentler high-end, slightly more noise, and the warm, round sound. On the Line6 POD and other modeling devices, you can achieve some of these goals by not gaining up too far and by using the available compressor to give you a singing sustain. Don’t fall for bright, sharp, ambiences. Remember what kind of echo was used and try some pre-delay on the reverb. In your amp chain, you can back off the gain and add a good compressor to simulate studio compression. The best I've heard lately is the Barber Tone Press compressor.

Production/Engineering philosophy issues: The seventies were a time of experimentation! People weren’t the least bit afraid to wind out an EQ until it screamed. It was a regular practice for some of the period to apply generous EQ, much more generous that we apply this days. They weren’t at all aware that EQ caused phase shift and ringing, so they literally worked with their ears. Just remember the limitations of the time. In recording, you should be aware that you can saturate a particular frequency range and drop your overall headroom if you boost too much at that frequency. An alternative is to use your EQ to remove other frequencies so that your target frequency range is more pronounced. Get to know your mid and upper-mid freqs - a little EQ can often be the key to a particular sound.


ARTIST INFO:

The Doobie Brothers
General notes: Producer Ted Templeman (who later produced Van Halen) and Engineer Don Landee had a philosophy of EQ’ing each sound to occupy it’s own portion of the sound spectrum. Listen for it and adjust.

Tom Johnston: Originally a Les Paul gold top and an SG but he moved into a Flying V and, I think, a Firebird. Amps: Super reverbs first and then some of the first Mesa-Boogies later in the seventies.

Pat Simmons: Live in the early seventies, he used Gibson ES335s and ES345s and Ampeg "Portaflex" flip-top bass amps with 15" speakers. That wide-range sound comes through on "Wheels of Fortune" from Taking it to the Streets. He ran at a lower gain than many for rhythm and his low-end was noticeable.

Jeff Baxter: By the mid-late ‘70s, he used and endorsed "Delta" custom amps with radio-button-selectable setups and tape-cartridge echo. I saw him play one in 1978. He built his own Tele and Strat and even wound his own pickups. He was an early proponent of the Roland Guitar synth. By Living on the Fault Line you heard plenty of it.

Recording: The Doobies recorded with Deluxes and Princetons, used a Champ for "listening to the music", and shared an old blonde Bandmaster for leads on many recordings, if I remember right. I think they made a short fore’ into Marshall around "The Captain and Me".

Joe Walsh
Live, he used hot-rodded, blackface Twins in the early seventies and later used Bandmasters. He removed the yellow cap (sometimes red) between the bright switch and the treble control on the normal channel and placed it in parallel with the one on the vibrato channel to increase gain and high-end. Early on, in the studio, he used hotrodded Fender Vibroluxes and Deluxe reverbs to record. He did his own mods. Joe used Echoplex EP2s (tube) and EP3s (solid state). He also used Leslies, which can be pretty well copied with a Hughes & Kettner Tube Rotosphere. His tones, however, can't be easily emulated without some study. Many of his sounds were heavily compressed, starting with James Gang Rides Again. On Thirds you can hear him playing with the studio compression on an acoustic guitar: apparently they used it during recording and he interacted with it through the headphones. He uses mostly glass slides in the studio and heavy brass slides on stage and plays slide with a pick. Post-amplifier studio effects added in recording or the mix were sometimes the key to his sound, i.e. a flanger or phaser, post everything. So What is full of post amp-chain phase shifter and there's a sunburst ES335 used for some of the parts. He placed Leslie units in odd places in the signal chain as well. Producer Bill Szymczk used real tape flanging on many of these recordings when you hear it, i.e. the end of "Days Gone By" from The Smoker You Drink the Player You Get or "Life In the Fast Lane" from Hotel California. That was often applied to a copy of the entire mix and sections were edited in. Joe used a Les Paul custom and Vibrolux for stuff like "The Bomber/Bolero/Cast Your Fate to the Wind", though the Leslie passage was played on a Tele (with action lowered 'til it buzzed). For the slide lead part, he mic'd the Vibrolux and ran the Echoplex to it and directly into the console, on separate tracks. They manually panned them around separately. Joe liked to jack up the Les Paul's pickups really high to increase the output. He also had a nice Strat ("Life's Been Good"). During the very early seventies, Joe made a name for himself by locating and buying '58, '59, and '60 Les Pauls and other vintage guitars and giving them away to friends.

Following Joe's recorded processing through the years is like an education in recording engineering. His producer/engineer, Bill Szmczyk, is brilliant. On "In the City", from The Long Run, his slide parts were recorded through both a Fender amp and a tube Leslie amp. The mic'ing on the Leslie is a story unto itself. The basic sound is the Fender amp, but if you listen carefully toward the end of the cut, when he holds a sustained note, they subtly crossfade from the Fender to the stereo Leslie, on which the rotors are winding upwards to high speed. What a touch! The sound spreads outboard and fades down into the modulation of the Leslie.

So who was this that was recently asked?  :)

I still remember replacing my stock 1976 Gibson Les Paul pickups with DiMarzio Super Distortions (which didn't see stupid at the time ;D ).

Great article Jon  :)- Is this yours or someone elses?? :-?

Not mine. Lifted from a guitar site, just thought it worth saving

Do you know who wrote it Jon?  Just idly curious  :)

I'm sorry... I am missing the point of the article... for the most part, it's common sense stuff that every guitarist or recordist should know after playing guitar for a few years... those parts that aren't flat-out wrong, at least.  

The whole discussion of "high-end relaxation" is utter bullshit... the Beatles master tapes made it over 40 years in nearly perfect condition. The "limited EQ" stuff is BS too.  If anything, earlier EQs had much, much wider range and were far more aggressive than modern ones.  I'm not sure where to start on the compression discussion... I'm not sure how anyone who has even touched a compressor in a studio can say that in the 60's and 70's the only compressors available were "tube compressors" from Lang and Urei, and Neve on-board compressors... given that possibly the most important development in compression was the solid-state Fairchild... in the 50's...

Much of this reads like a poor combination of "common sense" (humbuckers are louder and thicker than single-coils... time-based effects are hard to reproduce live) and old-wives' tales.  You'd be much better served to follow the examples of some people who really know what they are talking about, for example, the two "Behind the Glass" books,  Tape Op the magazine, and the two Tape Op books are great stores of actual information.

http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Glass-Record-Producers-Softcover/dp/0879306149/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263235225&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Glass-II-Producers-Craft/dp/0879309555/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263235225&sr=8-2

http://www.amazon.com/Tape-Op-About-Creative-Recording/dp/0922915601/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263235275&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.com/Tape-Op-About-Creative-Recording/dp/0977990303/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263235275&sr=1-1

http://www.tapeop.com

well, if you are missing the point of the article then I won't bother explaining.

It's no aspersion on you.  I just think the author is fairly well off base on his intro material, or talking common sense for most of it.  There is a lot of good, solid, factual information out there on the web, and there is also a lot of stuff like this, which is opinion loosely based in fact, and including some stuff that's flat-out wrong.  As always, everyone is free to choose their sources.  

The "interesting" aspect of the article (for me) is the confirmation of what I have always known to be true (and maybe this is common sense) that a really good amp sound is only had by cranking the amp up really loud.  I have never been fond of preamp distortion, the best kind absolutely comes from the power tubes running wide open (as everyone knows) so that you get the lovely distortion and compression of the output valves which gives lots of sustain with a very clear sound without any fizzy sound to it because very little distortion is actually creating the sound.

It confirms my belief that recording guitar amps at low volumes (unless they are very low wattage amps of course) is a waste of time as you never get the sound that can be had when you open up the throttle and move into the magic zone.

Like I said, it's all subjective.  I've heard great guitar tones recorded at low volumes, and bad guitar sounds recorded at high volumes, and vice versa.  The author seems to be saying this is the preferable method to get distortion--by pushing power tubes--and on some amps that sounds great, but not all.  What if you want a clean sound? etc.  It really depends on what your equipment is and what kind of sound you are going for.   The most interesting part of this to me is his production notes at the end... I don't know where he got them, but they are interesting.  I don't find his editorial content to be of much use.

CraigBert — Jan 10, 2010I still remember replacing my stock 1976 Gibson Les Paul pickups with DiMarzio Super Distortions (which didn't see stupid at the time ;D ).

I did the same thing with my SG's and Ibanez Artist, But then I found Duncan Distortions which I still use to this day.

Jon — Jan 11, 2010The "interesting" aspect of the article (for me) is the confirmation of what I have always known to be true (and maybe this is common sense) that a really good amp sound is only had by cranking the amp up really loud.  I have never been fond of preamp distortion, the best kind absolutely comes from the power tubes running wide open (as everyone knows) so that you get the lovely distortion and compression of the output valves which gives lots of sustain with a very clear sound without any fizzy sound to it because very little distortion is actually creating the sound.

the recorded tones I am not an expert on, but in live playing, power amp distortion is much more important to me than preamp distortion. The reason being that any amp even a small one pushes out a lot of air if the power amp is breathing hard, plus the dynamics take on a whole different character than pre amp distortion did for me. The guitar comes alive with power amp distortion, there is something in it I can't explain. But the strings come alive to me. It is like the strings are helping me play or something like that. That is why when I played out, I always owned three Fender amps depending on the room I was playing in. A Deluxe Reverb, a Pro Reverb, and a Twin Reverb all of them pre master volume control models. I used to turn the volume on 10, trebles on 10 Mids on 10 and the bass and reverb on 3 (The Deluxes had no Mid but you could approximate it by putting the bass up a little) With my picking dynamics and my guitar volume and tone controls I could go from clean to scream without touching a foot switch. I felt that kind of thing when I forst got my Hot Rod Deluxe, jamming with friends. But to a lesser degree than the old Fenders.

Getting good recording tones in 2010 at low or high volumes is a direct correlation of the equipment you are using. In 1970...tube sag was king. Bands like Journey and The Who recorded fantastic tones. It's almost ironic that we , in the future, are trying to emulate those older tones.
In 2010, we have more to work with. Yet we still desire to play through vintage equipment to achieve the sounds of old.

Brad Paisley playing through a HotCat live is stupid good tone.

Perusing around he likes Teles with Kinman pickups.

And to me.....good 'ol Brad has some good tone.