neil young and guitar amplification
Did you see him on the Tonight Show last Friday? My 12-year-old, the handsome and brilliant Preston, watched alongside me in stunned disbelief. Preston goes for a fair range of styles and decades -- Jason Mraz, Blue Oyster Cult, Kanye West, Dead Kennedys, Eric Johnson -- but none of it bears a remote resemblance to an elderly dude in a Hawaiian shirt blinking and twitching and strumming a harmonica. "Oh my God," he said, "even you're better than this, Dad!"
I don't know an awful lot about the fellow (though I know a lot of his songs well enough to play and sing them -- he's one of those high-prestige Baby Boomer artistes whose products I find I don't need to buy for pretty much the same reason I don't buy recordings of snow shovel noises to put on speakers on my front lawn). Preston's friend's dad was a Neil Young fan, though. He told me that Neil is famously gear-oriented and an audio fussbudget, which he mentioned in response to what I said struck me about hardest about the performance -- the awesome guitar sound. In close-to-instant succession I 1) thought, "What a killer-diller guitar sound!" 2) noticed that there was a big mike in front of it, 3) noticed that the sound didn't get louder or quieter with his twitchy movements toward and away from the mike, 4) noticed the cord coming out of the guitar, 5) thought "what the heck kind of electronics gets that kind of simulation of air movement?"
If you're a normally adjusted person you will have stopped reading by now, but I may as well conclude. Pick-ups, in case you don't know but for some reason are still reading, sound, in Tony Rice's estimable phrase, "like shit." They are an unnecessary evil of live playing, or would be if everybody didn't play so damned loud and if sound guys as a group still understood how microphones work. The moment I disclose this prejudice, some gearhead invariably pops up: "You just haven't tried the [insert the Mix magazine flavor-of-the-month $500 pickup/preamp operating system] -- once you do, you'll never go back to mikes." Wrongo! Of course certain acoustic pickups sound better than others, but that's exactly like saying a certain kind of condom is especially pleasurable. Which is one thing guys never say, you'll notice. An excellent and easy disproof of the notion that pickups are a good in themselves and not "necessitated" by live-performance conditions is to try and find a studio recording of a decent player using an acoustic guitar with onboard amplification. You won't.
So anyway, a quick visit to my friend Dr. Google informed me that Neil Young uses something called "FRAP" (Flap Response Audio Pickup...or, "Fulks Ridicules All Pickups," now no longer as true) which I will now read up on for further information and delight. If any players out there have a Frapped guitar, please let me hear from you!
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9 comments
I agree that accoustic pickups suck. He does use the FRAP system and I think it's some sort of stereo pickup device.
I've seen him live many times and always thought his accoustic sounded pretty damn good and he never used a mic as far as I could see...and I've been pretty close a few times.
I actually was a little underwhelmed by his sound on Conan. I didn't think it was bad, but I've heard it a lot better. I guess that could be because it was his own road crew, PA etc. Maybe the mic he used was a polar pattern that rejects a lot of sound from the rear (hyper cardiod?)so they can get a lot of gain before feedback out of it. Maybe that, combined with his pickups is why he had so much freedom of movement.
Yes, I'm a geek.
I'm just happy when microphones work. Took me years to find an accordion mic that could cope with a loud band - a sawn off SM58 (inside - horrible air sound - outside - nasty home-made metal mount needed to be made) was the Louisiana method of choice. Then I found out that the BBC mic-ed up the guy who played on Paul McCartney's rock'n'roll CD (Chris Hall - he plays on "Brown Eyed Handsome Man") with a £180 saxophone mic. If it's good enough for the BBC, it's good enough for me. Used it ever since - and it doesn't FRAP in the slightest.
Pick up system is trance audio amulet made by Gary Hull $549
The mic is probably a wide cardiod pattern not tight like a hypercardiod as his movements would cause more pronounced level changes as he moved in and out of the pick up field and off axis is pretty clean, course its probably limited for tv consumption. Mic looks like most high end pencil type condensers with a AT windscreen. Color didn't seem right for neuman maybe an AT4041.
Never saw where the monitors were placed and didn't see in ear. Monitor straight back- cardiod patern. 60 degrees off the back to the sides hypercardiod as those are the null points of the patterns. Anyway go to tranceaudio.com for info on his pickup. Course playing one of Hank Williams Martins dont hurt at all either.
Back when I started performing in the early 1920s, we didn't rely on the crutch of electronic amplification to get our musical ideas across. If it was a big room, we simply played louder. You kids today with your Marshall stacks and wah-wah pedals and humbucker thingamajigs, you've sacrificed whatever soul you might have had on the altar of Reddy Kilowatt.
In the immortal words of my college biology professor, "Wow, that's some serious ignorance there, son."
By this point, it's obvious that Neil Young's voice is an acquired taste. However, to casually dismiss his songwriting and his huge influence on a whole generation of modern rockers is simply, well, ignorant. There are a number of Neil's albums (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest, Tonight's The Night, Zuma, Rust Never Sleeps, Ragged Glory) that I would rank among the very best of the past 40 years.
It's understandable that a 12 year-old would prefer Jason Mraz to "an elderly dude in a Hawaiian shirt blinking and twitching and strumming a harmonica". But it's strange that someone who appears to be interested in the history and craft of modern songwriting would dismiss an artist's entire body of work without even bothering to listen to it.
This comment, by the way, takes nothing away from my appreciation for the work of our humble host.
I'm pretty sure Neil's tech Larry Cragg does those pickups.
They're stereo, at that, so the lower three strings are mixed in one speaker, and the higher three in the other, as can be heard on the acoustic side of Neil's RUST NEVER SLEEPS record, most noticeably with headphones.
(He's got Neil's 12 string wired up so that it has three pan positions.)
LC does work on the side too, so look him up online if you're really interested.
If you think Neil's acoustic set-up is impressive, check out his electric gear:
http://www.guitarworld.com/article/neil_young_ragged_glory
http://www.thrasherswheat.org/friends/amps.htm
I use the Fishman Aura, built into my Martin, and that sounds pretty damned good. Certainly works better for me than any mic I can afford, particularly in my home studio.
I think FRAP is one of the oldest acoustic guitar pickup systems out there--pre Barcus-Berry, even. How old is it? I recall it being written up in the Last Whole Earth Catalog, ca. 1970. Neil might have been using FRAP dating back to Buffalo Springfield.
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