Tuesday, 17 November 2015

La Bête Blooms Guitar Recording Techniques

In my initial meet with La Bête Blooms, they made clear that the main focus of the recordings would be the 'Wall of Sound' type approach to recording guitars. Almost as if the guitars were the main focus rather than the vocals in most popular music.

When conducting my initial research I discovered an article on Butch Vig (Buskin, 1997) and Nevermind. The article briefly mentions 'Wall of Sound' in relation to experimentation and multi-layering.


All this improvisational trial-and-error multi-layering could be said to amount to a latter-day 'wall of sound'. Vig agrees: "Kind of! I mean, a lot of the bands that we listen to and who we love are doing very similar things: Tricky, Massive Attack, Björk...(Vig cited in Buskin, 1997)  


Upon further researching I discovered Phil Spector, the pioneer of the wall of sound technique. I gained a basic understanding of what the Wall of Sound technique entails at the following link by reading a blog post by Hollis (2010). He states; 


 Phil Spector is famous for the ‘Wall of Sound’, He created this sound by having a number of instruments or vocalists perform the same parts in unison, then he would record the sound using an echo chamber. Some tracks were doubled or tripled to make songs sound fuller.'  Hollis (2010)


Taking this into consideration, I don't have access to an echo chamber, however I do have the ability to record and multi-layer guitar takes playing the same parts in order to create a dense, full sound much like the original Wall of Sound technique pioneered by Phil Spector.   

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