andyprickett.com

Here’s some more general “philosophy”:

I have an older brother. He exposed me to music at an earlier age than I probably would’ve been on my own. When I used to hear “Baba O’Riley” on FM radio here in Southern California as a kid, I couldn’t help but be ignited. Add Led Zepplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Cheap Trick, Boston, KISS, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and then The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Cars, The Pretenders….you get the idea: lots of great guitar music, where the electric guitar was featured as a powerful and melodic beast. This put the “call” inside of me, and I’ve been “responding” ever since.

I can hear a sound in my head, and feel it in my gut. I’ve been chasing it for what seems like my whole life. I heard these records and more when I was young, and have integrated them into a bunch of other things that have moved me (movie soundtracks, other records as I got older, life, etc), and now the computer of my brain has synthesized them into something. I am driven to spit this back out in the form of my own guitar playing, with my “own” sound. It didn’t come out of “nowhere” (although an album by that name definitely helped). It’s a response. Think about how many people this has happened to, and now you have a music equipment business (you’re welcome, Guitar Center).

So, I believe it’s good to know what you’re hearing. Think about it. When I heard those records on the radio as a kid, they were certain instruments (now regarded as ‘vintage’), recorded on tape in an analog studio, pressed to vinyl, and played back over FM airwaves, through a great stereo receiver and big tower speakers in my living room. Take any one of these out of the chain, and it’s different. During my search for a sound, I made it my mission to understand all of those elements, and how they affect what I’m hearing. I recommend researching this to anyone who really cares about truly finding the “response” to their “call”. If you don’t have the patience or drive to do so, adjust your expectations of the results accordingly.

It might be easier than you thought, nowadays. I recently visited Drew Brown. We sat down at his computer and went through some plugins looking for the best sounding stuff. We plugged in a guitar, brought up the Amp Sim in Logic, started adding some other plugins to the chain, and before long had a sound going that Drew proclaimed to be perhaps “the best guitar sound I’ve ever gotten,” or thereabouts. Probably an overstatement, but, with a Les Paul, a Marshall model, some very vintage eq, compression, and tape modelling plugins, we had answered a call. In a computer. Doesn’t matter how we got there, it just matters that we did.

And you can usually tell when you do by the fact that you have to force yourself to stop playing.