Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

i have the same exact guitar and it sounds sorta close but not exactly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TahA-67V7UA


also if anyone could make a tab for this song it would be greatly appreciated
the one on the internet now doesn't seem right

Johnny Marr's guitar is from the early 80's - the pickups sounded different back then. You could try a Janglebox pedal.

Funny - I'm not a huge fan of that twinkly Ric sound. In fact, I have seen some recent R.E.M. clips, where I don't really like Pete Buck's Ric tone either - too dry with twangy distortion, no chime at all. It's interesting that, as I have developed the sound of my own equipment, as well as my own playing, I wind up in a place where I like my guitar sound better than the people who inspired me to play those guitars.

thats exactly what i want the twinkly sound

and how the pickups were different in 1980's? i thought both now and than were high-gain pickups

Blasphemy! Blasphemy!

That's a pretty unusual sound. I can't say that I hear any of the richness that I generally expect with a twelve, but I do find efforts to produce something other than the old stanby Rickenbacker twelve tones interesting. My first impression was that he was possibly using really light strings. There seems to be a little distortion mixed in (or fret buzz) and It also almost sounds like the signal is being processed through some sort of gate. When you combine that rather tinny, twangy tone where the primary strings aren't making much sound with what seems to be sort of a delayed attack and abrupt decay, it reminds me of the sound my cheap (and not very usable) noise-gate makes.

That's a six string

It sounds to me like there's an awful lot of chorus on it too

So it is....(puts glasses on to look at screen this time). In that case, there must be some sort of chorus, delay or other gizmo "doubling up" the sound a bit - which might also make the attack kind of strange. I still also think it must have very light strings. It's an interesting sound for the tune, but in general if my Rickenbacker six sounded like that I'd be seriously thinking about sending it out to Dale to see if he could fix it?

That guitar sound is, as Teb mentions, an artifact of a chorus or even a subtle phase effect. Listen to the drums in the introduction to this song and you can hear the effect before the guitar starts to play. There is definitely a sweeping effect in the mix.

Todd - I reckon a fair amount of the blame for the sound you don't like comes from the quality and age of recording to be honest.

Definitely try playing around with some combination of phase/chorus and you'll get there. Or don't bother, because he didn't use that sound on the (better sounding) recorded version. I actually have a smiths gig on DVD from early 1984, after this one, and Johnny was by that time going to town on this effect. And it sounded pretty bad to be honest.

That is a very 80s-ish clean and chorused guitar sound. A lot of REM and Smiths has that type of RIC sound. I like that sound some of the time, and I'm a huge Smiths fan, but it is sometimes disappointing to me that the "twinkly" RIC sound is one that some people identify as the only sound a RIC can put out, much to my chagrin.

If you want that sound, play clean, with a chorus, cut out the mids, and use a fair amount of treble.