That FAT '70s Electric Sound

[Bob Womack]

I’ve been asked to discuss the methods used to get the full, fat, guitar sound of the ‘70s. I’ve got an outline going and will try to sit down for the next few mornings, with either my Line6 or Svetlana Vacuum Tubes mug full of coffee, and flesh out some notes on the subject. I’m going to approach this 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 more artist info. I racked my brains and wasted lots of money in the ‘70s trying to reproduce these sounds as a guitarist and then began to understand them more after I became a recording engineer.

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. We’d use an outboard preamp (Electro-Harmonics LPB1 or LPB2 or MXR micro amp) to jack up the gain and get more sustain live, but on the recordings, the amps had lower gain. Compression, sometimes to an extreme, was added as you recorded or mixed. 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 Strat because the gain is lower.

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 limited total gain. Master volume and channel switching amps don’t do this as well, but offer easy switching from really clean to really dirty. The touch-sensitive sound was usually used in conjunction with compression of the recording.

Discuss amongst yourselves. More tomorrow...

Bob

[bino]

i'm looking forward to hearing what you've got to say! I love the sound of my strat thru my mesa rectoverb... plenty of tone, but not as FAT as some might prefer...

[TheStugots]

Me too Bob! I am sitting at my computer patiently waiting........

[Bob Womack]

Most of you will know this, but I’d better cover it. Humbucking pickups are fatter sounding than single-coil ones. They reproduce a full octave less overtones than the single-coil ones, emphasize the midrange more, and have a higher output. During the ‘70s, DeMarzio began winding hot pickups with much higher output but 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. It was discovered the hard way that it is possible to raise your pickups high enough that their magnetic influence dampened the sting’s sustain.

The seventies were 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 head-banging on the part of guitarists came in. It was truly a disappointment sometimes to hear a great guitarist live, because he often couldn’t reproduce his studio sound. I remember Steve Howe’s early attempts to reproduce some of his stuff involving both acoustic and electric sounds by using a Gibson EDS1275 double-neck 12/6 and switching necks. 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 or flanger, only to find that it gets totally lost if you gain up. When applied to the recording, however, it swooshes over the entire spectrum of overtones generated by the amp’s distortion. Echo applied into a gained-up amp alters its degree of saturation, and thus, its 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. It was normal to build up this huge sound in the guitar-amp chain and then try to add just one more effect and have it ruin everything. Very frustrating. One of the few devices which had a positive effect on the sound was the Echoplex. Even with the echo off, it fatten up the sound of your guitar.

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


More to come...

Bob

[Godzilla]

I know this is kind of a tangent, but IMO modern high-gain amps have sucked a lot of the soul out of music. They are good for what they are, but give me an amp that "breathes" and responds to the player any day and I'll be much happier than with a Triple Rectifier or a Triple Super Lead.

'zila

[bino]

I've been very happy with my Mesa. I went through a phase where "gain=tone", but that's just not the case. With too much gain, my guitar just gets lost. I just dial in a nice little overdrive and you can completely take your sound wherever you want it with your style. (did that make any sense??) Good job, Bob. Keep it coming!

[cal]

keep it coming.

i like how bob breaks it up into sections so the readers don't get lost.

very good posts.

[troubleman]

My main rig:
1961 Fender Strat or 1957 Gibson Les Paul Jr -> Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer Compressor -> Vox Cry-Baby Wah -> Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face -> UniVibe -> Late 60's Maestro Echoplex -> Marshall Jubilee 1/2 Stack or Budda 4x10 Twinmaster (Budda's ROCK!)

That rig produces one PHAT sound. My latest infatuation: a Dr Z Route 66 amp..... PHAT tone lives in that thing too.

peace,

jb
2003 315K Ltd
1999 355-12 String
1995 GA-WS Ltd
2001 Collings CJ-A
1999 Larrivee Parlour (mahogany)
because of GAS - way too many electrics to list
oh yeah, I almost forgot - an ancient Ovation Balladeer for camping trips.

[Bob Womack]

I'm drinking from the Svetlana mug today.

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. These units are considered like gold. We recently sold one of our 8058 Neve consoles from the facility where I work. Before it could leave the 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 was the nature of recording rooms themselves. While Jimmy Page loved to play and record in naturally ambient rooms and take advantage of their properties, which may have sonically set him apart, 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. This was all changing and a big turning-point album is Toto’s “IV”, which plainly shows the turn toward reflective recording rooms.

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 echo 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 debuted the 224, the first really flexible but reasonably affordable digital reverb. From there came a trend towards use of brighter and brighter reverbs with everything, which peaked in the electronic late ‘80s. Probably the brightest was Yamaha’s series of studio reverbs.

More to come...

Bob

[cal]

thanks bob, great posts

waiting for more.

[Simplyhere]

Yep, I have to admit I love this thread. Great stuff. Just picked up a early 70's silverface princeton reverb and just added a Barbar Direct Drive SS to play around with. I just like making weird noises with the electric. I play the acoustic, I just fiddle with the electric. Thanks Bob, great stuff.

[Bob Womack]

I'm still using the Svetlana mug today...

Echo: Digital delay made its debut around 1975. The first generation was clumsy and noisy. I worked at the studio that received Lexicon’s second-generation DDL, the “Prime Time,” serial #00001. It revolutionized delay and was the standard throughout most of the eighties. Before that, delay was created with tape decks by recording a sound and playing it back in real time from the play head. To get multiple echoes, you mixed the output back into the input. As the echo faded off, each pass through the deck cut treble, added bass, increased noise, and increased distortion. Often, guitar parts with echo were recorded through an “Echoplex” boxed tape echo machine. Joe Walsh used it 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 passage through air and bounces off irregular surfaces does exactly what the tape did. We’ve gone full circle with this. My modern, inexpensive, and very cool Korg digital delay pedal offers both clean repeats and extensive tape emulation features (bandwidth reduction per iteration, distortion). I was an idiot: Even though it was bulky, noisy, and clunky, I still miss the Echoplex I sold.

As has been mentioned before, from the mid-seventies to the early eighties, pop music recordings were 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 drop off. Toward the end of the seventies, they’d rush the tapes from the studio to the mastering engineer, often via courier, to have them cut to the master and 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?

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. Engineers used graphic EQs to get a little more flexibility. Parametrics weren’t available until about 1976 and you might only have two to four channels available in a studio, unless your budget was huge and you rented. Val Garay, owner of Record One in L.A., who produced and recorded Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, and Orleans, 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 in impact on the gear used by the artists for recording and the artists themselves were reticent to discuss it. However, Tirane Porter, former bassist for the Doobie Brothers, did a Guitar Player interview in which he admitted the fact that Ted Templeman, the Doobie’s producer, chose his bass strings for a piano-ish sound. He didn’t particularly like the sound but Ted did.


More...

Bob

[trpullen]

Good stuff Bob. I remember doing work in the analog studio too. Lots of setting the bias hotter on the deck and saturating the tape to get that phatness.

I totally agree too regarding the amp "brown zone". I have a Fender Custom Vibrolux Reverb from 1995 but no master vol. I can get tones, subtle OD tones that only come from getting into the power tubes AND running a 40 watt amp into 20 watt speakers.

[Boogie]

I love this stuff.

I have had "vintage" tone success by using a class A 35 watt Mesa Maverick and a Fender Twin (sometimes in stereo with chorus and delay). I can get real compressed or brown (boogie) or very open clean air sounds (twin). I use all analog effects and change between humbucking and single coils as needed.

I am mostly interested in the delay stuff mentioned earlier. I cannot find a delay that really satisfies me. My 80's Analog delay has a really warm tone but when I use it in stereo it kills the signal (cuts the power in half) and it only has 300ms delay. I have never liked any of the digital delays that I have tried (sterile and thin). I HATE the line 6 DM 4. It is very popular but I find that it is a total tone sucker and it doesn't sound authentic at all (thin, noisy in a bad way and the volume changes between patches).

Other than the expensive rack units by TC and eventide or a vintage echoplex, does anyone have a recommendation for a good stereo delay pedal?

Have you any opinion on the new Boss DD-20?

How about the old Korg D-400?

????

[Bob Womack]

Look around for a Korg DL301. It can be modded to run in a parallel loop, and thus not affect your main sound as much. Oh, yea. The Line6 delay modeler pedal is supposed to be nice as well.

Bob