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Johnny Marr "How Soon Is Now" Trem


morpha2

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I'm thinking I need to upgrade my trem. I bought a Behringer a while back because I figured I wouldn't need it much so why pay for a better pedal. It sounds okay, but kind of...meh.

 

Anyway, what would be a good "step up" pedal that can do Johnny Marr types of extreme tremolo? Is the BYOC any good?

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Hmm...the tap tempo stuff is probably a little too sophisticated for my needs. I'm thinking more along the lines of the severe depth that Marr got than trying to nail that song tempo-wise.

 

 

im thinking a choppy trem and then a looper to run loops of the riff at two dif settings to imitate the amps. choppy like seek trem,semaphore,menatone,pn2 etc

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Earthquaker Hummingbird is the choppiest trem I can think of ... I love mine. It's almost like a punch in the gut at high volumes. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you want, though. Go to their site and listen to the samples.


 

From the description, that sounds pretty rad! Great price, too. I'll check out the samples when I get off work.

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He used two Fender Twin Reverbs with the tremolo going at a different rate on each one. It'd probably be best to get a tremolo with tap tempo so you can sync it up to the riff you're playing perfectly.

 

How the hell did they accomplish that live? :confused: That's one thing I love about bands from that era - they did a damn good job of playing in time to analog effect rates.

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here's the tricks to that sound:

 

it's not a choppy tremolo, it doesn't 'bottom out' but it is deep. so a trem with a good amount of depth but not necessarily full chop.

 

stereo.

 

multiple tracks. marr used multiple guitar tracks to get it to sound as deep and thick as possible.

 

some other studio weirdness/experimenting. i wouldn't doubt one of the overdubs is played backwards, etc...

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I don't know who Johnny Marr is .... but the VL Trem is pretty vintage sounding. PM me if you're interested.

You make me feel old. :cry:

 

Here's the song being referenced... the studio version. It's pretty not possible to replicate that in any trem pedals I've heard thus far. I mean, as you can see from the previously posted Smiths live video, he just sets it to a rythmic chop. But the studio version has that undulating wave-over-wave thing going on.

 

K2NrIALcNOw

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I like the VL trem, but it's not really gritty enough to cop that sound.

 

I've tried to cop that sound, and it just doesn't seem right to me. It'll do a great choppy sound, but not quite the same as Marr's. I think the Pentavocal trem does a good approximation, but it's still not sloppy/gritty/dirty enough, even with the bottom level tweaked.

 

I haven't really tried it yet, but I think a brownface-type trem, set to its deepest setting, would probably work better.

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Johnny Marr (guitarist, the Smiths): As a kid I was fascinated by Hamilton Bohannon's Disco Stomp and New York Groove by Hello, and I wanted to make something with that stomp. The first decent amp I got was the Fender Twin because the Patti Smith Group used it, and it had this amazing tremolo. Later when we'd had a few hits, a review of What Difference Does It Make said I'd written a riff that was instantly recognisable, which fascinated me. One night I was playing for my own pleasure and I suddenly got the riff. It all came together - the tremolo and the stomping groove - for what became How Soon Is Now, although my demo was titled Swamp. Because it was a groove track it originally appeared as an extra track on a 12-inch, but popular clamour forced its single release. I remember when Morrissey first sang: "I am the son and the heir ..." [Producer] John Porter went, "Ah great, the elements!" Morrissey continued, " ... of a shyness that is criminally vulgar." I knew he'd hit the bullseye there and then.

 

 

multi-tracked tube amp trem, riff played in time with the chop.

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Marr said this in an interview with guitar Player in 1990:

 

"How Soon Is Now" [Meat Is Murder] was in F# tuning. I wanted a very swampy sound, a modern bayou song. It's a straight E riff, followed by open G and F#m7. The chorus uses open B, A, and D shapes with the top two strings ringing out. The vibrato sound is {censored}ing incredible, and it took a long time. I put down the rhythm track on an Epiphone Casino through a Fender Twin Reverb without vibrato. Then we played the track back through four old Twins, one on each side. We had to keep all the amps vibratoing in time to the track and each other, so we had to keep stopping and starting the track, recording it in 10-second bursts. This sounds incredibly egotistical, but I wanted an intro that was almost as potent as "Layla" -- when that song plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is instantly. "How Soon Is Now" is certainly one of the most identifiable songs I've done, and it's the track most people talk to me about. I wish I could remember exactly how we did the slide part -- not writing it down is one of the banes of my life! We did it in three passes through a harmonizer, set to some weird interval, like a sixth. There was a different harmonization for each pass. For the line in harmonics, I retuned the guitar so that I could play it all at the 12th fret with natural harmonics. It's doubled several times.

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