On 29 September 1986, Iron Maiden released Somewhere in Time, and the sleeve promised a machine age: a cyborg Eddie, a neon city, and guitar synthesizers credited on the record for the first time in the band’s career. The detail worth keeping is a smaller one. The song that started life on a synthesizer is […]
In the 1930s, engineers at Bell Labs had a problem that had nothing to do with music. Long-distance telephone calls arrived thin and unnatural, stripped of the small delays and reflections a voice picks up in a real room. Their fix was mechanical: a spring stretched inside a housing, with a transducer at each end. […]
For most of recorded rock, amp tone was a one way door. You picked the cabinet, you placed the mic, you committed. If the mix later told you the guitar was too thin or too woolly, your options were to live with it or to book the band again. The device that quietly dismantled that […]
A Solo That Wasn’t Supposed to Survive In 1960, inside the low-ceilinged Nashville room known as the Quonset Hut, engineer Glenn Snoddy was cutting a Marty Robbins country ballad called “Don’t Worry.” When the session reached its instrumental break, the part Grady Martin was playing came back through the console
Ask most people to explain the sound of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and they will point at a pedalboard. Fuzz, reverb, chorus, a delay or two, stacked until the guitars melt. It is a tidy story and it is mostly wrong. The thing that gives Loveless its seasick, underwater tuning is not a box on […]
On the night of July 14, 1973, Clarence White played a pickup set at a bar in Palmdale, California, with his brother Roland. Shortly after 2 a.m. he was loading gear into the car when a drunk driver hit him. He died later that day. He was 29 years old. The obituaries filed him under […]
Every heavy guitar tone you love owes a debt to a design brief that fit in a single sentence. In 1969, Mike Matthews, who had founded Electro-Harmonix in New York a year earlier, asked a friend for a circuit that would sing forever. That friend was Bob Myer, a Bell Labs engineer, and the answer […]
