S IGNALCHAI N
She Put the Whammy on Me
Since last month’s installment I’ve been
watching You Tube in a quest for some
insightful angles (and some not-so-obvious
answers) as to what really makes up the
“tonal thumbprint” of a great artist. This
month we will explore an old theory from
the early to mid-1970s that revolved around
certain methods for giving guitars and basses
more sustain. I’ll concentrate on a few particular Gibson models, because I discovered
something rather unique and common to
getting a great tone – regardless of this seventies wives’ tale.
Part of this theory began in the early seventies when Alembic claimed that installing
solid brass nuts and other heavy brass hardware increased sustain due to the increased
mass given to these areas of the instrument. While their claims were questionable,
one thing was for sure – these instruments
spawned a lot of shoulder problems due
to the weight of fancy, exotic wood and
beefed-up brass hardware.
There was also a particularly famous Gibson
ES-335 player that touted the use of a stop
tailpiece to give a guitar more sustain, but
what I observed and heard (some 30-odd
years later) was quite startling to say the
least. Here’s where the craziness began for
me. I stumbled upon a You Tube clip of the
late, great Freddie King playing an ES-355
TDC. Interestingly enough, many great
American bluesmen favor the ES-355 TDC;
although B.B. King used an ES-335 early on,
he eventually landed on his ever-present and
famously named ES-355 TDC. In the mid to
late-sixties in England there were two very
influential guitarists using vintage dot-neck
ES-335s – Alvin Lee of Ten Years After and
Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple.
How does this all fit together, you ask? When
you see footage of Freddie King playing his
355, you’ll notice that he played with his fingers; however, he actually yanked the strings
up with his third and middle fingers while
playing through a Fender Super-Six Reverb
set at full-tilt. In the case of B.B. King, he
also runs his amplifier (now a Lab Series L-
5 solid-state model) at very high volume,
only B.B. controls the overall volume with
his right hand to emphasize a stinger note
while bringing it right back down to a whis-
per just a split second later. Both tones are
vicious and snarling, but I noticed something
that all of the above-mentioned players had
in common. All of them had either Bigsby
vibrato units (Lee and Blackmore’s ES-335s)
or Maestro “Vibrola” units (on the ES-355
TDCs) that were factory-installed. However,
you didn’t see them use the vibrato bar at
all – in fact, they were turned backwards and
remained stationary.
Photo: Rob Wesley
A Gibson ES-355 TDC
The point is that all of these players had
stellar tone without stop tailpieces or brass
hardware. Outside of their guitar choice,
it’s all flesh, personal technique and volume
that really contributed to their unique sound.
However, I should mention that the weight
of the Bigsby/Maestro Vibrola accomplishes
another task; it gives the instrument more
string-to-string separation and has a different effect on the overtone series. Does this
mean that Eric Clapton’s 1964 stop tailpiece
ES-335 sucked? No way folks, it’s just a different tone.
Bear in mind that the Maestro Vibrola units
were stock on guitars such as the SG Special
(Standards and Customs) as well as Firebird
VIIs and ES-355 TDCs. Earlier models of ES-
335 and ES-345 used Bigsbys. No matter, as
the same sonic principal applies here.
Since we used Eric Clapton as an earlier example, we would be remiss if we
didn’t mention that his famously painted
“The Fool” SG Standard had its Vibrola
bar removed – however, the long, metallic Maestro assembly that was part of the
main unit actually stayed on the guitar. Eric
probably elected to remove the vibrato arm
because he didn’t use it. My feeling is that
these players bought the guitars they used
only because they sounded great to their
ears and not because of their stock (or perhaps modified) parts.
I also strongly believe that what players
wanted back in the early 1970s was more
gain from their amplifiers, not sustain per se.
Listening to Freddie King will convince you
that he more than accomplished his goal by
using his stock Gibson ES-355 TDC with a
Fender Super-Six pushed way past the point
of stability. You can also watch his hands
and see that he avoided the low E string
because if it accidentally rang out it would
have sounded flabby and lacking in definition, due to the amp being pumped at full-blast. Yet the higher five strings still sounded
like a raging pitbull to me – I loved the way
Freddie got his tone by yanking the strings
with two fingers. PAFs or not, Freddie King
affected us with every single thing he did.
We’ll see you next month.
Head online to see You Tube
clips of Freddie King and Ritchie
Blackmore performing, only at
premierguitar.com (click on this
month’s HTML “Signal Chain”)
Dean Farley
is the chief designer of "Snake Oil Brand Strings"
( sobstrings.net) and has had a profound influence
on the trends in the strings of today.
