Quote:
Originally Posted by David
Has Lindsey (or anybody else) ever given more details about the VSO machine? I know that the device itself is referred to by several different names, & that its employment stretched beyond the recording studio.
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Musician's Magazine covered it a bit in their interview with Lindsey:
http://fleetwoodmac.net/penguin/archive/musician2.htm
The most important technique used to achieve the album's unique, concise guitar timbres was analog tape varispeeding. Buckingham is a VSO fiend from way back, and uses it on backing vocals and drums as well as guitar. "It's a voicing tool," he says, "a way of refining a sound-the harmonics of it-so it sits right in the track. It's like another version of EQ."
The actual technique is pretty obvious, says Lindsey: "You just slow the tape down to where you think it's going to sound right. Then you just play to the slowed-down tape; you've got to transpose, of course. After that, you take it back up to normal speed and see how it sounds. It's a real trial-and-error thing."
Varispeeding accounts for some 40 percent of the guitar sounds on the record, Buckingham estimates: "On 'Countdown' a lot of rhythm stuff was [recorded with tape speed] taken down, in order to come up more crystalline. And the lead sound is a Tele recorded through a fuzz preamp and VSOed. The idea was to make it come up like a violin sound. When [engineer] Chris Lord-Alge was mixing that he kept trying to fatten it up. I told him, 'No, it's gotta sting like a bee.'"
The dulcimer-like timbres in the intro to "Soul Drifter" were made with several tracks of VSOed guitars. "The ascending line"-Lindsey sings the riff-"that's two guitars in octaves. Then there's a [muted] 3/4-time pattern that goes across that."
Buckingham says VSOing produces results very much like Nashville tuning-"that high, harpsichord type of sound." While there are no Nashville-tuned guitars on the disc, there are a few open-G, 'E and dropped 'D tunings. There's also one Lindsey invented and dubbed his "oriental" tuning: "We put all high E and B strings on my Strat and tuned them all a half-step or whole step apart. So you get this . . .[he imitates the sound of a sitar's sympathetic strings]. You can get these nice open things going with it, like in the verses of 'This is the Time.'"
With all this trickery, it's no wonder that listeners start hearing things as they ain't. "A guy in New York was swearing he was hearing all these effects," Buckingham recounts. "He was saying, 'Yeah, you used a harmonizer on there.' But I didn't use any of that stuff. I had to tell him, 'I hate to burst your bubble, but it's just a different approach to recording.'"