As I noted in the recent Open Your Ears post on Björk, I had quite a challenge in choosing just one song to encapsulate the sound of Björk, as her band line-up and instrumentation tends to change for every album!

After some careful deliberation and a thorough review of my Björk CDs I decided on the track “Pagan Poetry“ from the album Vespertine.

The Vespertine Album: Evening Prayers and Snow

The album Vespertine uses perhaps the most unusual instrumentation of all her albums, including electric harp, custom designed music boxes and found samples provided by the duo Matmos. Samples used in the album include playing cards being shuffled and the sound of someone crunching through the snow.

The word ‘Vespertine’ refers to evening prayers and it is a distillation of this which the album is intended to evoke, along with the feeling of wintertime.

“A word that helped me a lot making this record was “hibernation.” being internal is a form of hibernation, and I related it to winter, the sound of crystals in wintertime. That’s what I wanted this album to sound like.”

– Björk

Björk has an unconventional approach to composition and has said she usually starts the songwriting process with a vocal melody, often improvised without musical accompaniment while walking. As a result most of her tracks are predominantly melody-driven, and have very little harmonic movement. It’s not uncommon for a Björk track to stay on a single chord during verses, perhaps moving to a simple chord sequence during choruses.

Pagan Poetry

The majority of Pagan Poetry is actually based around a four chord progression anchored by a repeating bass figure – so it is likely that the melody of the track was composed along with this bass line.

Björk’s songs often Click to read the rest…

In this, the concluding part of our series on the genius Les Paul, we are going to be looking at his contribution to the world of effects. For a modern guitarist, effects pedals are an integral part of their sound. There are a dizzying array of boxes available to feed the contemporary guitar slinger’s G.A.S. (“Gear Aquision Syndrome”), but in Les Paul’s day an amplifier was a pretty far out concept, let alone tone-bending stomp boxes! As usual Les broke out his tool kit and did some inventing…

We’re going to see how Les moved from capturing sounds to creating new ones, with Delay Effects, Vari-Speed, Special Vocal Effects – and a distinctive playing style to boot.

Les Paul’s Delay Effects

The effects most commonly associated with Les Paul are ‘delay’ or ‘echo’ effects. Many Les Paul recordings feature some kind of echo on the main guitar.

In the previous part we talked about Les’ involvement in the development of tape recording. Tape recorders have:

• a record head, which copies the sound onto the tape, and
• a play head which plays the sound back again

Les realised that if you position the play head after the record head and feed the signal coming from the play head back into the record head it creates a repeat or echo on the tape.

At first it might be confusing to understand why this works, but it’s much easier to get your head around it if you consider an example:

(For more on tape delay, see Hearing Effects: Echo… (echo… echo…))

The most common type of delay you will hear on Les’ records is a short delay often referred to as a “slapback”. This slapback delay has become synonymous with the rockabilly guitar sound.

Les Paul & Mary Ford – How High The Moon

How High The Moon (in 26 parts!)

Soon guitarists wanted to produce these amazing sounds when playing live, and 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…