The REAL Secret of Robben Ford's Tone....It's Not About Dumble or Zendrive...

Рет қаралды 6,720

John Nathan Cordy

Күн бұрын

Пікірлер: 68

@solonasdeimezis1004 6 ай бұрын

The real secret at his tone is his hands.....

@neilbertuk1 6 ай бұрын

It’s all in the tonewood!

@hartlee1160 6 ай бұрын

tHe tOaN iN hAnD

@Andrew-wb2zq 6 ай бұрын

Always is!

@jamesprice6381 6 ай бұрын

RIGHT AT the PEDAL show RF plays it TOTAL GLASS. (4) others play it, its moer boogiesh on OD remains glassy on clean tho.... i know Rfs sound guy on road Hes played it too w/Gold Top....My #124 tricked out doing crushed chord intro of CLIFFS of Dover..short video, u can go to the moon w/these circuits! kzbin.infosQtCZEn-vtk?si=3QcrOWBe5zPkXz-A

@ngaoutdoors4715 6 ай бұрын

Only 80%

@rigelloar7474 6 ай бұрын

Joni said that Carlton is her favorite guitarist. Larry's direct to console strat tone on the theme from the Hill Street Blues TV show , is one of the most beautiful guitar sounds ever recorded, it is unbelievably great, check it out!

@jamesgrobertson8024 6 ай бұрын

Very interesting I did not know that .

@Aussie100-hj2jm 6 ай бұрын

You sound really serious hahahahaha Hahahahaha Professional how mate ? Does your ex wife consider it a profession?

@rigelloar7474 6 ай бұрын

@@Aussie100-hj2jm If no talent and witless drivel were GOLD you could buy yourself a gig, c u n t .

@rigelloar7474 6 ай бұрын

@@Aussie100-hj2jm Remind me, what is the key signature for Ebmin9 to BMaj13#11 ? C u n t ?

@rigelloar7474 6 ай бұрын

@@Aussie100-hj2jm

@grahamcoxon 6 ай бұрын

The Tony Peluso solo (and outro)on the carpenter’s “goodbye to love” sounds to me to be done this way.. it’s great playing - very accurate bends etc - loved it as a kid (not so much the carpenters in general) …. Listening to it now is abit of a struggle! But it is great playing. The Larry Carlton soloing on Don Fagens “new frontier” is so bloody good.. perfect. but that was I think his 335 into a 50s tweed deluxe.

@derekhenderson1730 4 ай бұрын

My first intro to Larry Carlton was when he appeared on Court and Spark in 1974 with Joni. Amazing guitar work in the background on that album.

@TLMuse 6 ай бұрын

I love that you covered this performance and tone of Robben's-one of my personal favorites! (And thanks for the shout-out.) Clearly the real secret of Robben's tone is... Robben! But I really enjoyed your tone experiments here; evidently the secret of Cordy's tone isn't Helix, it's... Cordy. -Tom

@chrisgmurray3622 6 ай бұрын

Some of my first experiments with home recording involved plugging guitar into a tube screamer, then straight into the line input of the left track on the back of an old Tandberg reel to reel tape deck. Setting the pedal on a relatively low gain setting, and occasionally feeding it into a mic input gave it a very natural gain from the extra trim on the mic input, and with a bucket brigade analogue delay after it the sound was full, dynamic and realistic sounding. It was all I could do at the time, but years later in multi-track studios I found it took much longer to get a sound actually as good, let alone better than the crude set up I used before. Much of it was because I was using analogue tape, which adds its own compression and eq blending in the sonic soup behind the main signal, and this adds a " rushing" sort of sound that moves through the tape hiss and sits, like a background wash in the reverb , and makes the main ( higher-volume) parts of the music signal stand out, as if being against a shiny background. These kind of effects happened almost automatically as part of the analogue processing, and also helped soften the harsh treble spitiness that is the enemy of many digital recordings. It's almost subliminal because your brain naturaly edits out the noise anyway, so going for noisless recording is actually sometimes more of a problem for modern records; it's almost as if the low-fi imperfections set a higher presence for the main part of the music's program. Some of this thinking has been the reason for "tape" settings on digital delays; the rounding off from the high end of repeats on a delay line is more naturally how your ear would percieve those echoes if they happened after the speaker in a live session, and bounced off a cliff-side nearby. The reason you often need to shelve some harsh high end off digital line level signals before they hit the amp and speaker, is the same reason we all love valve amps, because their very imperfections ( adding sag, compression, high end roll off, and artifacts of harmonic distortion) are what we like the resultant sound of. It was possible to have laboratory level hi-fi reproduction using discrete transformer coupled transistor preamping by the mid sixties, and I'm old enough to remember people telling me..." No need for valves any more, you can get exactly the same tone from a transistor amp, and it's better because it's more accurate, and has less noise." Nowadays we have the same thing in digital modelling amp captures or constructs. There is a thinking that promotes the view that you can have all the advantages of old gear without the disadvantages....( uneven performance, too much artifact noise... etc), but this is a mistake. Even Rupert Neve has consistently opined that a mic preamp can be perfect but people won't want to listen to it, because it won't sound warm or natural. I don't suggest dialing in degrees of "low-fi" in digital recordings ( just listen to any of the stupid distorted mic recordings of the nineties grunge fad), but texture should be a result of the medium in a way the compliments the resultant feel or sound, like the cool look of an early sixties guitar that shows its battle scars naturally, rather than the highly "un"natural distressing of new instruments to give a dishonest appearance ( like a padded resume). To presume to record something with intention of super-accurate reproduction of an actual event in time, is full of philosophical pitfalls and contradictory to itself, so sometimes a non standard ploy can result in a more natural sound than if you presumed that a microphone can equate to the human ear and brain and be more "realistic". Can't say I actually liked any of the sounds you had with the fuzz direct, but maybe in a large mix it would sound psychoacoustically different.

@GuiitarBilly 6 ай бұрын

Larry Carlton was the first of Joni’s great electric sidemen. He was in the studio band Tom Scott put together for her 1973/74 release Court and Spark. LC came up with the fills and parts on her first real top 40 hits ‘Help Me’ ‘Free Man in Paris’.. When Joni went on tour with this band, Larry couldn’t or wouldn’t go because of his session career. Robben Ford took his place and the band was officially named the LA Express. This began Joni’s era of bands featuring great guitarists and other excellent musicians .. I think a (big) part of Robben’s latter day sound is pick attack…it gets that chirpy sound. Everything else sets it up, of course

@jackprice7828 6 ай бұрын

That first tone you played sounded very much like a tone on one of my fav Robben Ford songs "The Train Song" on the Jing Chi album. Robben Switches between electric and nylon string and then does an incredible lead part with what sounds like that fuzz tone.

@damonstewart70 6 ай бұрын

Jing chi was awesome have you heard their latest

@JonathanAcierto 6 ай бұрын

I don't remember where I learned this, but might be worth keeping in mind the console itself probably had tubes, so even plugging in straight to console there was probably some tube tone as well.

@zacharyoliver1325 6 ай бұрын

I'd absolutely use those tones. These were some of the more distinct and less-manicured tones you've worked on with your channel.

@patrickcrawford5532 6 ай бұрын

Love your regular tone, it's so recognizably you. But, when you turned the EQ off ~12m in, there's just so much more ~signal to work with. Maybe dabble with with the devil above ~5K!

@picksalot1 6 ай бұрын

Fuzz is an Effect that responds particularly well to the Tone and Volume Knobs on the guitar itself. You can get a huge variety of useful tones, including ones at the extreme ranges of the Knobs. 😉

@KozmykJ 6 ай бұрын

That's more true for unbuffered Fuzz than buffered, but true nevertheless.

@damonstewart70 6 ай бұрын

That's how hendrix used it,Pete thorn on one of his videos about a yr ago. Was experiments with the idea that maybe those classic glassy tones. Were helped by fuzz pedals, and he got great glassy strat tones by turning down the guitar volume, check it out

@KozmykJ 6 ай бұрын

@@damonstewart70 Yup a Fuzz Face type with the volume turned down is a nice tone 👍

@chrisquinn9104 6 ай бұрын

I don’t think MXR made a fuzz back in the day. My guess is it was a Distortion +. It was fairly common to call all dirt boxes a fuzz back then

@iagobroxado 6 ай бұрын

Yeah, I was about to post the same thing!

@deddiev1718 6 ай бұрын

I live in LA California and going to my favorite comedy club the Ice House in the 1980’s one night only Robben Ford and his blues band. Amazing.

@trioguitar 6 ай бұрын

There seems to be a very fine line between sounding good and sounding pretty ordinary. Having said that, I can definitely picture it being used in certain contexts. Actually does sound a bit like some early synth sounds (from mid 70s).

@KozmykJ 6 ай бұрын

The Fuzzy breaks sound more like Jeff Baxter. Do you have a breakdown aboiut who did what on that track ? Jeff and Robben both being credited.

@LenLynch 6 ай бұрын

The thick solos on "In France They Kiss on Mainstreet" sound more like Robben's phrasing to my ear, than Skunk Baxter. (I've been wrong plenty, for the record...) I've been so biased against Fuzz pedals, that it never occurred to me that these solos were done with them. But listening with fresh ears today: it seems so obvious, yes!

@KozmykJ 6 ай бұрын

@@LenLynch I'd have to put a lot more work in to think about comparing their phrasing . I was going on tones used by them that I've heard.

@vittigo 6 ай бұрын

For me that sound as a starting point to famous Metheny synth sound. Maybe not having amp in a signal chain is the way to achieve something close on helix. As always thx for inspiration.

@davidwilbur1272 6 ай бұрын

There are some interviews with John McLaughlin talking about plugging in straight to console with only an overdrive I believe. As always though, you sound amazing.

@aristocaster 6 ай бұрын

Second??? He bought one in 80's, Henry Kaiser and David lindley had been playing Dumble ODS years before.

@karabovilakazi5021 6 ай бұрын

where did you learn to play like that? any courses you recommend

@scottemmonsmusic6001 6 ай бұрын

Robin has very little drive on the fuzz it is very subtle it sounds more like overdrive than fuzz. The Reverb is quite subtle too in the mix

@MrKbeaumont 6 ай бұрын

It's not so much what it sounds like by itself. It's how does it sound in the mix? Those boards also have patched in external compressors too. And if the mixing engineer chooses, they can always re-amp the recorded part. So, by the time you hear the recording, the sound can be dramatically different from what was in the room when it was recorded. So all that Robben really needed was something usable.

@tbluesboye 6 ай бұрын

And nice to see the Tokai make an appearance. Great guitars!

@unicorneggspam 6 ай бұрын

I always heard blue jean blues by zz top was direct and Billy's playing and the tone is just incredible on that recording. It feels like you can hear his fingers More recently Mk.gee gets some really unique direct tones

@hartlee1160 6 ай бұрын

The toan is in the hands...... Anddd only in this certain year of vintage tube amp, with old tubes

@tbluesboye 6 ай бұрын

" Court & Spark" was Joni with Tom Scott and the LA Express (Larry Carlton) Great post John. Sadly I'm an analog dinosaur!

@RichardCharles-RCJH 6 ай бұрын

Yes it was. Joni's next tour and album after Court And Spark was Miles Of Aisles (live) with T C and the L A Express, with Robben on guitar. Then Hissing Of Summer Lawns came next after that.

@daviddalziel884 6 ай бұрын

Help The Poor is for me the classic RF tone . There’s also a great version of Any Colour You Like on a Pink Floyd tribute album which is super gutsy and as loose as you’ll hear Robben play . I saw him in Glasgow in a tiny venue and stood a few yards away watching him play mostly on a beat up Les Paul through a couple of Fender Twins and he was great , maybe two or three pedals at the most -none of this Mission Control nonsense which seems to be the norm these days -no offence TPS fans 🤣

@64cousins 6 ай бұрын

That first sound is like an 80s synth tone

@jamesprice6381 6 ай бұрын

EJ fuzz into a TC Dk Matter is AWSM.................

@damonstewart70 6 ай бұрын

For robben sound pick a little closer to the bridge.

@ggman946 6 ай бұрын

Generally, I’d say most of the sounds you got were a bit odd when taken in isolation. But then again, you could say the same about the solo in the Stone’s Sympathy for the Devil. That horrible sound works in the right context. 🤷🏻‍♂️

@basiltiffani8850 6 ай бұрын

The cut to Truefire is....abrupt.

@robertj1303 6 ай бұрын

why do you think Robbens tone deserves so much praise? My ears have more people in front of him, Allen Hinds, Shawn Tubbs, Martin Miller, Tim Pierce etc. Robben also style and songs are also not that popular compared to others. Therefore I think you need to look at others just as much ch me thinks. 😅😅