Guitar Sounds You’d Never Heard Before?

Grumpyrocker

Back when I was getting to grips with the guitar as a teen the  Maiden album Fear of the Dark came out. And there was one bit that I couldn't fathom at all - it was the second phrase of Janick's solo to Afraid to Shoot Strangers. Sounded amazing to me and I had absolutely no idea what he was doing until I saved up enough for the TAB book. He was tremolo picking harmonics high up on the fretboard going down from the high to the low strings. Really simple, but I absolutely loved it. 

Oh and the guitar as a motorbike sounds on From Here to Eternity too. Fabulous.

blobb

Glissando Guitar. I was a bit obsessed with Johnny Marr jangly sounds until I came across Steve Hillage doing this.......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mwQdAQqd8k

MrBump

When I was a kid and just starting to play the guitar, I thought that the solo on Beat It was played by an electric violin.  Messed with my head when I found out it was a guitar.

stratman3142

I'd been playing guitar about a year when Hendrix died and Voodoo Child went to number one. I'd never heard anything like it. Completely new sounds. Nothing since has made such a huge impression. Everything else, that followed, pales into insignificance by comparison in my mind.

It's hard to imagine now but, at the time, those sounds simply didn't exist in the days before extensive use of special effects and synths etc.

Whitecat

Matt Bellamy in modern times...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR6A3dap6MI

underdog

Have we covered Tom from the first Rage Against the Machine album yet? 

vasselmeyer

I was 17 when I first heard the opening riff for "Money For Nothing". I'd never heard anything like it and it was that sound that made me want to play the electric guitar in the first place. It's still a very difficult sound to get right.

ICBM

vasselmeyer said:

I was 17 when I first heard the opening riff for "Money For Nothing". I'd never heard anything like it and it was that sound that made me want to play the electric guitar in the first place. It's still a very difficult sound to get right.

So much so that even the studio engineers who recorded the original couldn't replicate it. It was an accidental combination of a wrongly-placed microphone, an amp they weren't even intending to use and the alignment of the stars, or something...

DiscoStu

I was thinking about this yesterday as it happens, what was the last great new thing in guitar playing that I can recall?
And the answer to that is Tom Morello.
How he played and what he did with the Whammy - and not a whole lot else - was new, fresh, exciting and influenced a whole new generation of players. Matt Bellamy is the most recent guitar icon in my opinion but his style is just an evolution of Tom's. Jonny Greenwood gets some nuts sounds out of his gear but again it stemmed from Tom's Whammy and killswitch work.

There's maybe some new radio1 rock band that have a 'new' sound but from where I'm sitting I haven't heard it yet.

DiscoStu

As an individual sound, Johnny Marr's main guitar line in 'How Soon Is Now?' springs to mind, the haunting backward tremelo one (if that's even what it is). Another studio concoction which to the best of my knowledge he cannot replicate live. It's an awesome sound and one of the most distinctive in guitar music.

ICBM

DiscoStu said:

As an individual sound, Johnny Marr's main guitar line in 'How Soon Is Now?' springs to mind, the haunting backward tremelo one (if that's even what it is). Another studio concoction which to the best of my knowledge he cannot replicate live. It's an awesome sound and one of the most distinctive in guitar music.

Done with something like six Fender Twins with the tremolos sync'd as closely as they could be manually. They then slowly drift out of time with each other so you get that odd rhythmic 'beating' between them.

hobbio

Rocker said:

I realise this is a thread about new or rare guitar sounds but if you ever heard Mary Bergin play the tin (penny) whistle, you would be blown away by the sounds she could extract from that simple instrument. She plays notes that are simply "not there" for ordinary mortals. I played a tin whistle when I was younger and always thought I could drag a tune or two out of it. But it was nothing to what Mary could do with that tin whistle. Nothing has ever impressed me (musically) as much before or since. Genius.

He's right you know.

UnclePsychosis

ICBM said:

DiscoStu said:

As an individual sound, Johnny Marr's main guitar line in 'How Soon Is Now?' springs to mind, the haunting backward tremelo one (if that's even what it is). 

Done with something like six Fender Twins with the tremolos sync'd as closely as they could be manually. They then slowly drift out of time with each other so you get that odd rhythmic 'beating' between them.

"The compelling effect in question was achieved without the aid of samplers or digital simulators, but manually on traditional analogue equipment. The first step involved taking a basic rhythm guitar part, which had been recorded as a 'dry' DI (direct-input) take without any effects. Porter was already in the habit of taping a safety DI guitar track for every Smiths recording in case needed to alter or manipulate the sound at a later point in the mixing process. The song's texture was further enhanced by Porter's employment of noise gates and the same dry guitar track fed through a quarter note delay signal. 'I had all these combinations which were pretty much all the same guitar but through various faders', says Porter, 'each with slightly different sounds on. It was a combination of all these things'.

This dry guitar pattern was next relayed to four Fender Twin Reverb amplifiers, each with its own vibrato tremolo switch. As Marr's plain rhythm was played back through the speakers, Porter and Marr controlled the vibrato on one pair of amplifiers apiece to create the swampy, shuddering texture required. Whenever their tremolo slipped out of sync, the recording was stopped, the tape spun back and recommenced, sometimes recording in bursts of only ten seconds at a time."

---an extract from the rather excellent Simon Goddard Smiths book.

Jonathangus

vasselmeyer said:

I was 17 when I first heard the opening riff for "Money For Nothing". I'd never heard anything like it and it was that sound that made me want to play the electric guitar in the first place. It's still a very difficult sound to get right.

I'd have been a year or two younger, I think, but other than that - exactly what you said.  Even now, I still struggle to equate that sound with being a guitar at all.

lasermonkey

For me, it would have to be Treasure by Cocteau Twins.

I'd heard an album by them previously, which sounded vaguely Banshee-esque, but interested me enough to try to track it down. I didn't have much success at the time, but I eventually found Treasure in the Cambridge branch of Andy's Records. Maybe this was what I'd heard previously?

When I got home I played it. It wasn't the album I'd heard. It didn't sound much like it at all and I wasn't sure I liked it. One thing I was sure of is that I'd never heard anything like it before. I played it again. And again. And again. By now I was utterly besotted.

I've spent the past 31-odd years trying to understand exactly why Robin Guthrie's playing gets me the way it does, but I still haven't grasped it. There's plenty of other people who use a shed-load of delay and reverb, but not one I've heard so far that does that thing.

frank1985

It’s got to be Geordie Walker of Killing Joke’s guitar tone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrxS4Tu1zM

Gibson ES295 semi hollow body with tonnes of echo, sustain, chorus and flanging

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbkzX5e6hHs

Plus his own inimitable dissonant style

EricTheWeary

frank1985 said:

It’s got to be Geordie Walker of Killing Joke’s guitar tone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrxS4Tu1zM

Gibson ES295 semi hollow body with tonnes of echo, sustain, chorus and flanging

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbkzX5e6hHs

Plus his own inimitable dissonant style

There was a KJ track on R2 this morning ( Love Like Blood IIRC), the song is about 80% bass line but there is that non conventional guitar all over it.

BintyTwanger77

lasermonkey said:

For me, it would have to be Treasure by Cocteau Twins.

I'd heard an album by them previously, which sounded vaguely Banshee-esque, but interested me enough to try to track it down. I didn't have much success at the time, but I eventually found Treasure in the Cambridge branch of Andy's Records. Maybe this was what I'd heard previously?

When I got home I played it. It wasn't the album I'd heard. It didn't sound much like it at all and I wasn't sure I liked it. One thing I was sure of is that I'd never heard anything like it before. I played it again. And again. And again. By now I was utterly besotted.

I've spent the past 31-odd years trying to understand exactly why Robin Guthrie's playing gets me the way it does, but I still haven't grasped it. There's plenty of other people who use a shed-load of delay and reverb, but not one I've heard so far that does that thing.

The guitars on the opening of Sugar Hiccup dropped my jaw first time I heard it. That was my first experience of the Cocteaus. Long may they reign.

MagicPigDetective

When I was around 15, just started playing and getting into indie, bought the Boo Radleys first album, Everything’s Alright Forever. It has some incredible shoegaze type tones, swooshing, soaring, sometimes like a jet engine, like nothing I’d heard before. I still have no idea how you make such sounds. I met Martin Carr when I lived in Cardiff. I told him I loved the sound of the guitars on the record; he said they had wanted them to be even more extreme than what was on the record. 

https://youtu.be/KatZSNzcdyQ

lasermonkey

I always thought that the Boo Radleys were better than the "My Bloody Valentine that Creation can afford" monicker suggested. EAF is a fine album that crosses stratospheric guitars with a pop sensibility. It's my favourite of theirs.