A recent photo of notorious rock n' roll recluse Kevin Shields.
Is it just me or does Shields have a more than a passing resemblance to another guitar god, Jimmy Page?
Hey Kevin! What Took You So Long?
The 22 year wait for My Bloody Valentine's new album is over and most folks agree it was worth the wait. I hope the wait for the next album isn't two decades because I'll be too old, too deaf and probably dead and buried by then.
Three of the nine songs have more of a dream pop orientation than shoe gaze noise rock sound of
Loveless. The embedded song below almost sounds like an outake from a mid 80s Cocteau Twins album.
Here's some of my observations on Kevin Shields unorthodox guitar playing and how he gets that thick, off kilter, liquid guitar sound that has become his trademark style over the years.
I've always thought that Cocteau Twins guitarist Robin Guthrie and Kevin Shields have been mutually influenced by the other's style of guitar playing. In the early Eighties Robin Guthrie was the pioneering guitarist who introduced a radical new approach to guitar playing that used lush thick chords played through a digital sound processor to create an impressionistic palette of strange and beautiful guitar sounds.
In 1988 Kevin Shields raised the sonic sound bar up a few notches with the release of My Bloody Valentine's second album
Isn't Anything .
Isn't Anything overlooked album and it was a harbinger of their 1991 magnum opus,
Loveless. Around the time when
Isn't Anything was released, I heard the term
shoegazing creep into the urban hipster vocabulary to describe MBV and a handful of like minded purveyors of dream pop. Three years later, in 1994, the
shoegaze descriptor had became a standard genre category to describe a wide range of bands who usually played in downtempo or midtempo time signatures including: The Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Slowdive, Ride, & Low.
There's more than a touch of the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie in Kevin's studio obsessiveness. "In attitude toward sound, yes," Kevin once said. "But not in approach. The approach for me is very simple, minimal effects, whereas the Cocteau Twins is based on the idea of using effects as instruments. I think Robin Guthrie is quite good, by the way." Guthrie relied on studio overdubbing and pre-recorded loops in live shows to get that thickly layered guitar sound with the Cocteau Twins. He refined it later on in his solo albums.
Shield's guitar playing sounds like it's overlaid with dozens of overdubs but in reality Shields use very few overdubs.
The bigness of his guitar sound comes from the fact that Shields often plays in open tunings which leaves a lot of room to play odd variations of a chord. What people mistake as lots of guitar overdubs are just varied inversions of the chords. Those inverted chords along with Shield's use the tremolo arm (aka "whammy bar") on his guitar are a big part of his trademark
wall of guitars sound.
The one effect Shields uses quite often is reverse reverb which he processes through on a Yamaha SPX90 digital processor. SPX90 inverts a normal reverb envelope without making the notes backwards.
Shields spends hours adjusting his guitar & amplifier settings prior to a gig or recording session. If you've ever seen him play live, you may have noticed he uses about 15 or 20 floor pedals to alter the tone of his guitar with his processor. Shields: "There are certain settings I use that, along with the way I have the tone of the guitar set up, create a totally melted sort of liquid sound."
The reason why so many people try bit ultimately fail to imitate Shield's guitar sound, is his esoteric ritual of setting up his guitar and amp sound is a trade secret known only to him. On top of that, most rock guitarists have been trained to play in standard tuning and playing in open chord tunings has only been mastered by a handful of rock guitarists like Shields, Guthrie and Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis.
It's a big challenge for a rock guitarist who's been trained to play guitar in standard tuning to drop everything to learn the art of playing in open tunings, which requires the mastery of a completely different skills set. It's like re-learning to play guitar all over again. When Jeff Beck decided to master jazz guitar in the early 70s, the skills set was so different, he said couldn't play any of his previous rock & roll material from the Yardbirds because of the demands of learning the jazz guitar discipline. Beck didn't play a single blues song or Yardbirds song during the four year incubation period when he reinvented his entire approach to guitar playing. My point is once you've become a fully developed guitarist in the standard E-G-A-D-B-E six string tuning, it's a daunting task to drop everything and relearn guitar playing in open chord tunings.
A few blues players like the late great Duane Allman, Johnny Winter and Butch Trucks play with equal proficiency in standard and open tuning, mostly because playing slide guitar in the old fashioned delta bottleneck style requires a mastery of open tunings. The most notable open tuning guitarists Ry Cooder, John Fahey and Joni Mitchell all have folk music backgrounds. Prior to emergence of Robin Guthrie & Kevin Shields, very few rock guitarists played in open tunings.
Keith Richard sometimes uses an eccentric five string open tuning (G-D-G-B-D) in which he removes the sixth string from a vintage 1953 Blonde Fender Telecaster he uses only for playing in his self taught variation of Open G tuning.
Shields' main instrument is a Fender Jazzmaster guitar known for the note bending capabilities of it's whammy bar. He sometimes uses a Fender Jaguar which is slightly different in tone and playing feel from the Jazzmaster.
Shields has an elaborate system of miking his amplifiers. When I saw him live, he had 2 Marshall JMC800 amps, one of which had a standard single amplifier microphone but the other half-stack of amps had about 9 microphones aimed at the amp from numerous angles. His final piece of equipment is the Yamaha SPX processor which he uses to create all of those strange processed guitar sounds like vibrato, reverb, reverse reverb, sound delays, pitch modulation, sound compression and echoing.
I once watched a MBV sound check & it's hard to tell exactly what Shields is up to when he sets up his equipment but he's completely hands-on and doesn't allow the sound person to set up anything. I don't think Shields is using this painstaking ritual of setting up to conceal his trade secrets... He's simply an uncompromising perfectionist who has to personally adjust each and every setting according to the size of the venue, wall/ceiling & floor acoustics, the varying angles of the stage perimeters and probably even for the precise room temperature of the venue.