Making this video was an absolute blast; and I can say that spending a few hours with Wafa Ghorbal in your headphones is very inspiring.

You can learn a bit more about these old guitars on my Teisco page. The guitar in the video is an ET-200, which apparently means “electric, tremolo, 2 pickup”. People call them “Tulips” due to the shape of the body. It’s from the late 60’s. I got it on eBay for a pittance. Upon arrival I found it virtually unplayable, but some tweaks to the neck and hardware made it, ummmm… kinda playable.

I dipped the original pickups in melted wax (called “potting”) which killed the unearthly squeal the thing produced within five feet of an amp. I started playing it every now and then, and found if I cranked my nice tube amp way up, I could get a neat sound - snarly with sort of an “AM Radio” character. After a few beers it was kind of fetching - for guitar solos. The thing just had no articulation for chords; that is, play a chord and it sounded like mush.

Also, the whammy bar was untouchable, breaking the high E string with the slightest bend. (If you’ve seen the vid, you know I do like my whammy bar…) I managed to find a repro tailpiece for it, and installed it (I had to drill out every mounting screw - all of ‘em were seized). I also stuck some surface-mount P-90 wound pickups on it, which seemed like a good guess for the era and style of the guitar.

This produced a major problem though. The new pickups were a lot taller than the originals, so I had to shim the neck up - a full 1/8 inch in fact, making the guitar even harder to play.

I strung it up, and before I even plugged it in I could hear a big increase in tone and sustain from the new tailpiece. I still don’t understand that. Plugged in, the sound was like before - kind of mean & nasty, but also much more useful in chording and in cleaner settings. It still sounded the same, but it was more like I’d had my ears cleaned, if that makes sense.

In researching these old guitars, I think I saw two dozen YouTube videos of people banging away on these things. None of them seemed to have bothered to actually make a decent recording of what the guitars really sounded like, so I thought, “why not”?

THE VIDEO

I knew I wanted to do something that started with a bluesy clean tone, and then take it up to full gain, and maybe do something spacey as well. Thing is, I’m not that into instrumentals. I’d stumbled upon Wafa Ghorbals’ YouTube vids and remembered her acapella rendition of “Motherless Child”. I grabbed the video, played along with it a bit, got an idea of arrangement and tempo, and went to work.

THE VOCALS

My first task was to clean up the audio track of the vocal. It was full of footsteps, coughs, rustling paper. A night in ProTools took care of a lot of that, though I knew I’d have to automate a lot of level and EQ in a final mix.

Also, being acapella, the overall pitch changed slightly throughout, so I set everything to B minor (I like using some open strings when I can!) I didn’t have to auto-tune it, just some global moves.

Then I cut it into segments, set a tempo, and stretched/cut parts to fit.

FILMING GUITAR

I really wanted to stay true to the spirit of these YouTube guitar videos and not “lip synch” (err, finger-synch?) everything. Luckily my video camera is a Panasonic DVX with dual XLR inputs.

I ran a feed from my ProTools rig into one channel of the DVX, playing the opening drum loop. I mic’d my Peavey Classic 30 (I put JJ tubes and a 1970’s era JBL 12 in it, nice!) with various mics - primarily a Sure 57 - and the mic went into channel two of the DVX (hey, it even has phantom power).

For the opening section, I wore headphones; as the song grew louder, I just played the backing tracks through my studio monitors and cranked the amp (pre amp at about 1/2 and master about 3/4). I really didn’t have bleed problems at those levels. So essentially I recorded the guitar amp into the right channel, backing tracks into the left. I’d then align the video by ear in Final Cut pro, delete the backing track, and export the guitar in bits & pieces, import into ProTools and position everything.

By always importing and exporting the entire song, I rarely had to do much work with synching things; just drop the audio into the song (or video) start. Considering that most of the guitar was recorded into the DVX at 16 bit, mixed in ProTools at 24bit, and exported back into FCp at 16bit, I think it sounds nice & punchy. And my backing tracks stayed in ProTools so I was able to work in stereo.

THE WANNABE ROCK STAR GUITAR SOLO PART:

This was the Classic 30, an 80’s MIJ Boss CS2 compressor, and a Roland SDE1000 Delay (I have two of those!) Mic’d with an SM57.

For this, I looped the solo section from ProTools to repeat as long as I wanted, set up the camera, and did something like 15 takes, over and over. If you think of the “solo” as four sections - 3 that are D Major - to - B minor, followed by one that starts in E minor - I ended up using one entire take, and splicing in “section three” from another take (you can see the takes fade into each other quite clearly). The section I replaced was that fast, sloppy “Jimmy Page-ish” lick, that I still cannot believe I played with the action up that high.

Getting these parts down was made more difficult by the fact that I threw some lights up (I also wanted to be kind of silhouetted - this is about the guitar, not me) and had to deal with that, and the heat of those things.

Also, if you listen closely, there’s a left and right track of “power chords” under the solo. One uses both pickups, the other just the neck, both just dumped into the fabulous RedLine Reverb plugin. I really got a giant Marshall stack-in-a-stadium sound (at one point in the mix I ran those through a vintage 4×12 cabinet sim to get some low-end thump - can’t recall if I kept that though). Those guitars are clearer when the drums return for the ending - and yes, they’re all the Del Rey.

THE SPACEY SYNTH-EY PART

That was really simple - volume pedal - delay - amp. Pick fast with your right hand al-a Radiohead. Get a big cramp. I layered two tracks of that, and then did a third where I just feathered my right fingertips against the strings instead of picking. Really pretty if you ask me. Again, all done on the Teisco.

THE VOCALS

I spent the most time on this song in Final Cut, aligning the video of Wafa with the audio. In ProTools, I used the Massey CT4 compressor, VT3 EQ, and TD5 tape delay, the Massey Tape Head with a touch of grit, along with the RedLine Reverb. I did a tremendous amount of automating of the delay send, trying to keep the repeats clear of her voice yet get some nice slapback. I also had to automate a lot of EQ since a weird high-end sizzle appeared from time to time - I used Digi’s four band for that, and automated the gain of two high bands. I hope I struck a balance between clarity and “space”, but I also had to hide a lot of noise.

THE BASS

An old Fender P-90 Bass - it’s all I got. Very bright sound that I usually run through a Line 6 “Arena Backline Bass” preset. For this mix, I just compressed and EQ’d. That is about 4 takes, spliced together - I suck at bass!

DRUMS

Digidesign Strike. I start with a canned set of parts and then re-write ‘em to fit the song. Strike seems to fall apart on a complex mix (at least on my G5) so I disable all tracks but Strike (thus giving Strike plenty of processor headroom), record it to a stereo track, and then dupe the track for compression and grit.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I think I gave the old guitar a nice little showcase. I may eventually make a pickguard for it, lower the pickups to a proper height and remove the neck shim, even add a modern bridge. Look, it’s almost unplayable as is - what am I gonna do, lower the value to fifty bucks? I’ll keep the original guard and electronics, but maybe get a guitar I can cut some solos or backing with sometime. And it can always be returned to original.

I played my Strat tonight, and it felt GOOD. But that funky Teisco sure looks cool sitting around here. She’s a keeper.

And one of these days I’ll do a video of my hollow body…

Visit the Teisco Page for more Japanese-Guitar Cloudiness.