Labels:text | screenshot | font OCR: SMASH IT UP Bored with your sounds? Why not abuse your gear? Kevan R. Craft says ignore the 'proper' ways of using equipment and boldly go where no operating manual has gone before (But don't send us your repair bills!) The history of pop music is littered with instances of inspired abuse of musical equipment. Watch a video of Jimi Hendrix and count the number of ways his gear gets mis-used; amps driven way beyond their intended range, guitar played with teeth, elbows, mike-stands and feeding back wildly, maybe burnt or smashed to pieces and what on earth is he doing with that speaker cabinet? Most of the original unorthodox ways of using musical equipment have been mythologised and absorbed into today's advanced products. If you want distortion you no longer have to slice your speaker cones with a razor blade, as Fifties pioneers like Link Wray may have done - just footswitch to channel C on your amp, set up for high gain and tone. It would appear at first glance that there's less creative gear abuse going on. Today's attitude is much more conformist, while in the Sixties and Seventies the whole mood was more revolutionary - there was all kinds of weird and wonderful experimentation going on. The Beatles famously caused uproar at previously staid Abbey Road Recording Studios by overloading amps and desks to get a raunchier sound. The producer Tony Visconti always said that "the most creative way to use gear is to abuse it". Listen to the startling snare sound on the Bowie Album 'Low' with the over loaded harmoniser feeding back in a downwards curve. Ground- breaking stuff. These days if people are feeling adventurous they just go and buy a new sample CD. It must also be true that today's gear manufacturers, with more market experience and stiffer competition, are quicker to take up any new good ideas At Trace Elliot that's certainly the case - they have buyer suggestion sheets, returned with every amp bought. According According to sources at Trace Elliot, this reduces equpment abuse because "if the user requires any modifications to their amps or speakers then we can do it!" quick glance inside today's electronic musical instruments is enough to scare off most prospective soldering iron wielding customers. Where the razor blade used to do the trick, these days you need a computer, and a to be pretty handy with it too. However, some top repair men like Pete Woods does get inside and re-program E-prom chips (the equivalent of retuning a high performance car engine). He used to customize a considerable amount of equipment for Ultravox and he'd alter the E-proms so when the synth was switched on it'd say 'Ultravox DX7' or whatever - a security precaution. He also re-programmed drum machines, He has said "when things used to be for example to get a reverse cymbal sound. He has said "when things used to be analogue you could bodge about inside - now, you need to change the operating system completely and manufacturers are very reluctant to release their operating systems' details, so it takes some doing?" With samplers - surely the most popular new instrument of recent times - you far more frequently hear misuse of the sounds themselves rather than the equipment that made them. Check out the drastically high re-pitching of some break beats in dance music. The sampler itself, meanwhile, seems fairly abuse- proof. Digging around a bit, though, you find that the time-honoured art of using equipment in a new and unusual way is still alive. Transcendental Love Machine are an outfit with an interesting Shamen/Jane's Addiction style, and their "Trance Machine" 12 inch and "Machine Mania" EP (on the Hydrogen Dukebox label), are currently getting themselves a lot of attention. The singer, Doug, talks about the battle they have to get character into their sounds: "Electronic music can end up too clean if you're not careful. In the studio we put everything through a cheap old valve guitar amp for a natural warmth you don't get otherwise. Guitar effects are great It gives vocals an almost everything plus phasers and echo pedals." generally - wah wahs on ILM do their demoing on four-track, and the inevitable track-bouncing leads t some interesting effects. If they've recorded at low speed, the bass starts to break up in an understanable way - it looses top and middle, leaving a very narrow low frequency band. In the studio they try not to loose to much of its original burnt-out glow. In a more guitar-oriented field, Adam Lamprell, who plays with the intense and compelling ' Scissormen' , isn't restrained by what you're not supposed to do. He says he's got a Boss ME-5 multi-FX, and in one song he switches to a setting where everything's on full, including most importantly - the flanger resonance. The whole thing overloads and makes this outrageous car screeching sound. His analogue delay pedal has also been modified. Its been re-wired to bypass the delay pot with a volume pedal. If you play a note and sweep the speed downwards the delayed note zooms off into subsonic frequencies. Its far more violent than a Digitech Whammy pedal, and has sometimes actually made PAs cut out? WRECKERS' DOZEN 12 top abuse tips 1) Put anything through a guitar amp (for distortion and warmth). 2) Customise cymbals - take chunks out of them, or lay (less drastically) on on top of the other. 3) Hit the guitar amp for that reverb spring 'thunder' sound - old, but still good. 4) Route a harmoniser or delay back to itself. 5) Take screwdrivers/drumsticks to your guitar strings for some 'Sonic Youth' wildness. 5) Plug MIDI out to MIDI in for 'thicker' keyboard sounds (though drastically reduced polyphony) . 7) Put vocals through guitar multi-FX. 8) Route the monitor channel back to the 'record' track - just below feedback and you get massive EQ boost. 9) Record everything through a pedal - wah - wah or dimension D. 10) Switch things off mid-recording (with reverb on). 11) Lengthen SPX90-style reverse reverbs beyond normal use for weird 'saw edge' effect. 12) Play guitar through the audio input of old synthesizers for unusual envelope modification. * NOTE: Don't forget - messing with equipment that's still under guarantee will invalidate the warranty. And don't electrocute yourself or write in telling us that you broken your gear trying out these ideas. Tamper with care! Written for AM/FM by Kevan R. Craft 12 Mount Road Halton Runcorn Cheshire. WA7 2BH. England. U.K. Tel: +44 0928 563762
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