General Music Chat

Just a little youtube curio I just discovered with the electric guitar tracks from Norman Greenbaum's big hit on their own.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59pdUzOw ... re=related

That sounds really bad, OMG !!
We have been asked to cover that song.
I intend to resist with every fiber of my being.

HAHA yeah I always noticed how blubbery and farty the lead riff was in that song. Back in the days before filtering was a standard practice with distortion circuits. Those days, a guy just designed a circuit with cranked gain and pushed a preamp tube into overdrive clipping.

...still sounds awesome in the mix though!

Even with guys building transistor fuzzes back then, they still did a pissy job with their filtering designs which is really an embarrassment to technology since it's such a basic task. Often just a single cap and resistor is all it takes. It's a testament to how controlled people were and even musicians had trouble thinking outside the box.

We can thank Hendrix for the distortion refinements.
He was obsessed and changed the standard. So few people really understand that his "break through" playing was really a matter of improving the equipment. It's was written many times by the journalists of music, he was obsessed specifically with distortion circuits over all else.