Sound Like: Smashing Pumpkins
I spent most of my teens trying to sound like Smashing Pumpkins, so I put that to good use on a demo, where I use a Russian Big Muff and Janus Fuzz (plus lots of overdubs) to cover some Smashing Pumpkins tunes, specifically, two of my favourites from Siamese Dream - Cherub Rock and Hummer. For the curious, there’s also a list of guitar tracks on the recording below.
Cherub Rock Guitars:
1 — Jazzmaster bridge pickup, Muff tone up, close mic
2 — Jazzmaster bridge pickup, Muff tone down, close mic
3 — Jazzmaster neck pickup, Muff tone up, close mic
4 — Jazzmaster neck pickup, Muff tone down, mic position changed to be further from speaker
5 — Parker bridge pickup, Janus Fuzz, close mic
Hummer Guitars:
1 — Parker bridge pickup, Janus (stacked middle setting), close mic
2 — Parker bridge pickup, Janus (left-hand setting), close mic
3 — Parker bridge pickup, Janus (left-hand), mic moved to be further from speaker
4 — Jazzmaster bridge pickup, Big Muff tone up
5 — Jazzmaster neck pickup, Big Muff tone up, mic further from speaker
You can see from that, that I’ve deliberately used more Muff on the first track and more Janus on the second - mainly so that you can hear the difference between the two pedals. The Muff - unsurprisingly - is substantially warmer and darker, and if you wanted to nail the Hummer sound more exactly, let’s face it, you’d probably want to use a similar setup to the Cherub Rock setup above. Nevertheless, I can think of worse ways of comparing two cool fuzz pedals.
Here’s the blog post I referenced in the video: http://glittercop.blogspot.co.uk/2009... … in case it goes offline in future, here are the relevant bits:
Billy used a “Marshall JCM 800 100 watt head. James also used a JCM 800 but his was the 50 watt model.” It had KT88s subbed in.
He said of recording,
“Butch Vig and I were so sold on the sound of the amp that outside of a few select parts, I would say that 98pct of all guitar parts on the first two albums were done thru this amp/speaker combo. In order to change the sound, the Stratocaster parts would be recorded through a SM57 on the bottom right speaker, and the Les Paul parts would be recorded through a Sennheiser 421 on the top left speaker. This subtle difference between what speaker we would use created the sense of playing through a different amp set-up even though obviously I wasn’t.”
Here’s one about the use of pedals that appears to quote directly from Billy’s blog that he wrote in the early 2000s and that I also referenced:
http://glittercop.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/billy-talks-about-effect-pedals-used-on.html
Again, the key points:
“My first mental recognition of the ‘power’ of the Big Muff came one night when I just happened to drop by a Catherine band practice. Catherine was Kerry [Brown]’s band in the 90’s, and we used to share the same rehearsal space (they were the only band we trusted not to steal our shit and vice-versa). So I walked in and I just heard this tremendous ROAR and I thought to myself ‘how are they making that sound?’. Each of the 3 guitarists had Big Muffs and the sounds was very Sabbath-like, just throwing this tremendous low drone buzz into the room. I knew that the band Mudhoney used Big Muffs but honestly they weren’t using them like Catherine did. So I owe a debt of gratitude to Catherine for showing me the purple fuzz light. We used to try to use the pedals live but it was impossible for there wasn’t enough clarity.”
“Many songs would have as many as 8 fuzz guitars going at once. It was very difficult to record the tracks with this sound, but once it went right it was BLAMMO, a huge, huge sound.”
Worth noting as well are Billy’s settings on the Muff for Siamese Dream:
Volume: 1 o’ clock
Tone: 2 o’ clock
Sustain: Maxed out
So, there you have it. As I discuss right at the end, it’s hard to get this sort of thing to work well live, and for fuzzes I’ve gradually gravitated to more velcro-like fuzzes with noise gates. However, it is possible to get punch using Muffs live - check out bands like Amplifier and Oceansize for an example of groups that could tame the beast on stage, and as I touch on, running a stereo rig with a parallel channel that runs either clean or with a differently-voiced fuzz pedal can get you closer to that true Pumpkins wall of fuzz.
