Sometimes it can feel like the music world is just treading water between Radiohead releases. Yes, we’ll listen to tons of other bands and fully enjoy many of them, but Radiohead remains one of the only groups that can still stop everyone dead in their tracks, getting them to drop what they’re doing and run to their computers, scrambling to frantically download the band’s newest offering. Perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit here, but I’m certainly not the first person to posit that Thom Yorke and the boys really do seem to be our modern-day version of The Clash – The Only Band That Matters.

Radiohead makes it easy to be a fan of their music, because there’s so many facets to what they do: Their songs are sonically complicated, but still often melodic enough to get stuck in your head for days. Their lyrics are notoriously indecipherable, and even when revealed, seem to ask more questions than they answer. Each member of the band is highly proficient at his instrument, with madcap tinkerer Jonny Greenwood proving himself adept at gadgets a lot of us don’t even recognize. Yes, they’re the sort of band that bridges the gap between snobby musicians, music nerds, and passive fans who just like a good tune.

I was right there with all these folks in February, eagerly anticipating the release of the band’s eighth album, The King of Limbs. I’m having to restrain myself from diving into a full-on review of the record, because I could ramble on about it for a while. But I’ll keep it short, for our purposes here: at first, I wasn’t sure what to make of the LP. But after repeated listens, I’ve grown to love it. And one of my favorite tunes from the record is one of the more stark, airy compositions, and one that certainly didn’t click with me right away: “Give Up the Ghost.”

Give Up the Ghost

It was only when I watched a YouTube video of Thom Yorke performing the song solo that I put together its minimalist origins and its heavy use of looping. There’s one loop that runs throughout the entire song (the “Don’t hurt me” line), and even after I had listened to the track probably thirty times (before I had watched the vid), it never occurred to me that that part remained static throughout the course of entire five minutes. In the live version, it’s obviously tough to miss this – you can watch Yorke initializing that loop, as well as the others that chime in towards the end of the song. But on the album version, the band builds the composition so gradually and carefully that you never have a chance to get bogged down in any repetition. It’s really impressive.

The song starts with Click to read the rest…

In this final installment of our Hearing Effects series we’ll complete our discussion of modulation effects by looking at tremolo, vibrato, pitch shift and wah-wah effects.

First things first – I know you’ve been waiting to find out the answer to our last Bonus Question, from our article on Reverb Effects:

Who is the original wah-wah effect named after – and why?

It was jazz trumpet player Clyde McCoy. The reason the first wah-wah’s were named after Clyde is simply due to the fact that it was the electronic answer to the muted trumpet sound (utilizing a trumpet mute plunger) that McCoy had developed and used.

In 1967, Vox introduced the first “Clyde McCoy” wah-wah. This became the blueprint, and the rest; well, you know how these things go.

Nowadays, there are themes and variations on the wah-wah concept, just as there are themes and variations on all of the other audio effects we’ve discussed so far.

We’ll take a closer look at the functional and technical details of the wah-wah below. But we have a few other effects to cover first…

Tremolo/Vibrato Effects

The next stop on our tour is the dominion of tremolo and vibrato effects.

Right off the bat: this pair of effects uses just the “wet” signal and does not require it to be mixed with the original/”dry” signal to produce the effect. If you remember last week’s definition of modulation effects and the discussion of chorus and flanger effects, you’ll understand why we’re pointing this out as a difference. If not, go back and refresh your memory before we continue on.

Tremolo

Tremolo in its simplest form is an effect based on volume amplitude modulation; that is, the volume of the signal gets turned up and down. That’s it… volume up and down. A signal is fed into the tremolo unit and its volume is made to rise and fall according to three main controls: speed, depth, and (more recently) shape too!

The end result is the deep throbbing sound that bubbles up to full volume and then disappears into oblivion before repeating the whole cycle again.

The first and earliest examples of this effect Click to read the rest…

Last time around we were talking ear training for echo effects, all those wonderful ways to make many repeating sounds from one… Now for a slightly different effect (but definitely staying in the same family as echo):

On to reverb we go!

The story here is not much different. It was pretty much the same quest to produce that “spacious ambient” sound so common in halls, caverns, or caves that led this particular sonic safari.

Sure, the mechanics used are different for producing reverb sounds, but the evolution was parallel to the echo/delay story from last time.

• In place of tapes there are plates.
• In place of delay chips there are springs.
• In place of an echo sound there is the sound of halls, and large auditoriums.

Early Days: Physical Reverbs

You know the song and dance by now. All beginnings are humble, and this was no different.
Instrument amplifiers had springs placed in a “tank” with an electronic transducer feeding a portion of the amp signal to the reverb tank. The vibration and electronic stimulation of the springs caused the reverb we all know as “Spring reverb”. Listen to anything produced from the 1950’s and 60’s and chances are you’ll hear springs doing their thing.

A modern spring reverb unit (Image: Accutronics)

Studios on the other hand used larger versions of the same idea. Plate reverbs were and still are also very common in studios.

With plate reverb, usually a giant metal plate was suspended in an anechoic (meaning devoid of any natural echo) chamber, and driven with an electronic transducer – much like its little brother, the spring reverb. Plate reverbs were used on drums and vocals due to their inherent “bright” and slightly metallic sound. Actually, they were used on everything – for a while especially in the ‘70s and early ‘80s you could hear that “plate” on all the harder rock of the day.

In short, reverb, was produced in a mechanical way.
Click to read the rest…