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Bitter Soup

Upon listening to this, the reader will be obsessed with (shut up, I'll tell you what you should be obsessed with) the question: How did you get that groovy guitar sound? A '65 Fender Princeton Reverb? A digital delay fed through a Model 122 Leslie speaker?

Close. Think Stylophone. That was a late '60s--early '70s cheesy "synthesizer" that you played one note at a time by touching a stylus to a metal plate laid out like a piano keyboard. Despite being described as "the world's most annoying musical instrument," it's actually been used in some well-known songs, like David Bowie's "Space Oddity."

In practice, though, the keyboard scratched up easily, and it soon became unplayable (not that you'd really want to hear too much of it anyway). It did, however, have a vibrato switch, and I managed somehow to run my guitar through it -- a quite impressive achievement, considering it had no input jack.


The final verses: "Tiny little jewels, enameled with/corroded by hate," etc. were basically improvised, and it turned into the most melodious part of the song. Funny how that sometimes works (more often it doesn't; but on that we shan't dwell).


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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on June 13, 2010 8:03 PM.

The previous post in this blog was The Ball's In Her Court.

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