Citation:
BUILDING SOUNDS
"[With Victorialand] I used an acoustic guitar, which I still have which was made for me by the Kinkade brothers in Bristol, England, where Russell Fong was learning his craft at the time. It's quite simply the most beautiful acoustic guitar I've ever played. True, of course, is the fact that it is processed to shit, using, mostly, a unit I liked at the time called and Eventide SP2016. There is as well Richard Thomas who plays soprano sax, like an angel would, tablas, played by Richard also, some beatbox, a Roland Compurhythm CR8000 and lots of other processing." -Robin Guthrie, February 4/06
"...A kissed out red floatboat...ok.. no synths, it's all guitars and smoke and mirrors...the sort of synthy percussive sound that runs all the way through and is all on its own in the intro is a bunch of filtered delays triggered from the drums. I used a lexicon PCM70 for this..(same with the 'synth' rhythm thing on blue bell knoll)....the filtery pulsating wah sound which appears from the choruses to the end, well the exact guitar I can't remember but the jist of the sound is a triggered gate, triggering 16th notes from the metronome output of the sequencer, an emu sp1200, then wahed....the four guys in anoraks who always used to stand in front of my pedalboard and take notes and photos during the set (and nudge each other and look smug when I made a fuck-up) will know that I replicated this sound live using the same gate (a drawmer ds201) and an akai mpc60. The wah was a roger mayer customised crybaby....the acoustic guitar in all probability is my kinkade as mentioned in another answer, probably treble or quadruple tracked, compressed, delayed....The little riffs at the end of the verses were played on a fender electric 12...the sweep sound which crops up now and again is my broken (and I will never get it fixed) boss bf2 flanger...(broken as it goes into a very destructive oscillation if you wind the feedback up all the way - I have a couple of others which don't)...." -Robin Guthrie, December 5/03
"OK The recording of Blind Dumb Deaf was a little different to most of the later Cocteau Twins songs as it was our first album, we were studio newbies and didn't have the time or experience to experiment at all during the recording process. I wasn't really the producer (I didn't even know what a producer was at that point...) so all the work on guitar sounds as such was done before the band entered the studio from playing gigs and gathering what equipment we could.. Garlands, the album, was essentially recorded live in the studio with myself and Will playing together and Elizabeth overdubbing a few vocals later, very much the way most bands record..my guitar setup was this : a Kawai KS-11-XL electric guitar followed by an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi, a Watkins Copicat tape echo (3 button model), an Electro-Harmonix Clone Theory and then into another Watkins Copicat tape echo (4 button model) - this went into my amp, a Maine combo (60w 2x10 never seen one since..) . The bass was a Rickenbacker 4001 played through a Ibanez UE-400 Multi-Effects unit into a carlsbro stingray bass combo....There was one disappointment at the time which was the drum machines that we used at that time, a Boss Dr Rhythm and a Soundmaster SR88 played through the distortion channel of a HH IC100 combo were deemed unsuitable by the engineers and ivo (the grown-ups) and were replaced with the "more proffessional' (at the time as it had just been invented) Roland TR808... This made the drums sound very clean but weak, lacking the power that we were used to in concert.. I mean the stuff we used sounded way more like (what became) hiphop than electronic. But in spite of the lack of distortion on the drums the Garlands sessions were a pretty accurate recording of how we sounded at the time when we played live...." -Robin Guthrie, November 20/03
"...the violaine gtr- was doubled by....me..at the time, cutting and pasting was something I couldn't afford at that time..(Well who knows what a recoed with Liz would have been like? Having said that , I managed lots of the (so called) modern prodiuction techniques....! (not my editing)" -Robin Guthrie, September 24/03
"heaven or las vegas: As said before, for that whole album I mainly used the Paul Reed Smith and my 1959 Fender Jazzmaster although for that song I played a customised Levinson (a blue jazzmaster shaped one with a chandler maple neck) for the slide solo...The clean guitar parts were the Paul Reed Smith played through a Marshall 9000 series tube preamp directly into the board with my fave Lexicon pitch shift +10/-10 cents to spread the sound to stereo, followed with a little Roland Dimension D and echo from the TC2290, synched to the bpm, the chorus, more distorted guitar part was played through my Gallien Kruger preamp (channel 2) then the same sort of treatment, tweaked differently..I should have said before but I normally would compress the guitars to tape either with a Urei1178 or a pair of dbx 160x's...oh, and usually lots of double tracking...Simon played bass on that one, I can't remember which bass exactly (probably one of his precisions) but I think he played it through a rocktron bass preamp which was a favourite at the time. squeeze wax: strummy acoustic guitars, not fun to record at all but I was playing at that time one of a handful of acoustics none of which are particularly sexy, a black yamaha, a washburn 12 string and a red charvel flattop - my fave acoustic is a custom made kinkade brothers (made for me in 1995 for victorialand by the kinkade brothers in Bristol - where russell fong learned his craft) though I'm pretty sure it wasn't that one. I do know, however, that all the acoustics would be doubled or trebled then compressed to thicken the sound. The sort of funky guitar is a 1959 Fender Stratocaster played through a Tom Sholtz Sustainor and then into the board with a touch of all the same stuff I wrote in the last paragraph.. the fast tremelo guitar sound was created in the mix with a noise gate...S'funny I remember all the pre-rehab recording as if it were yesterday and the later stuff is a little more vague. I blame the sobriety.... Most of that equipment is still in my studio just waiting for an opportunity to get used but, to be honest, when I play through those things it sound so.. cocteau twins that I tend to avoid it...save it for a rainy day, I suppose...." -Robin Guthrie, November 14/03
"[Pitch The Baby]ok.. the pulsating stuff : was my green paul reed smith guitar (cause I did most of holv with it and my '59 jazzmaster) played through a gallien kruger preamp straight into the board. this was then treated with a lexicon 480L (pitch shifted +10 cents and -10 cents to make it stereo) and delayed with a yamaha d1500 in sync with the bpm of the track.. next the fun bit .. I inserted a drawmer ds201 dual noise gate over the stereo guitar and triggered it externally from click track playing 16th notes... then I rerecorded the track back from tape through a cry baby wah-wah which I moved manually (Ie with my hands) ..next: the clean guitars - same guitar through a tom sholtz rockmodule preamp into the board, a little roland dimension d and same yamaha delay....and the bass was a '57 precision played through a nomad bass box....sorry not to be more specific...oh, and there are no synths...." -Robin Guthrie, November 13/03
