Need Help Identifying This Effect Please

SonicExplorer

New member
Hello Gents,

On many of the early 80's classic metal albums there is something on the guitar tracks I'm struggling to identify. It may be a recording technique but I lean more toward some form of outboard gear or trick during mix. Strange sizzle in the upper frequencies. It is found on Sabbath's Heaven and Hell, Maiden's Beast, Dios' Holy Diver, and other classics. In particular producer/engineer Martin Birch often utilized this effect.

It is demonstrated in the attached guitar stem from the Holy Diver release.

Any ideas or thoughts as to what this is ??

Sonic
 

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  • Dio - Rainbow in The Dark Guitar.mp3
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Tony Iommi has fake finger tips from industrial accident his guitar is set up lefty and the action is set for his hand. I'm pretty sure he used the Small Stone, Big Muff ,Pog electro-hormonix stuff back in the day but seriously a lot of what you hear is his guitar in his hands.
 
Digital Fuzz? LoL Uh, no. That was a rarity back in 1980 time frame since digital gear and buffering was rare during that era. Digital sounds much harsher. That is generally the effect I'm referring to however, the analog harmonic/hair sheen on the track. There's some overdone pumping as well but the two wouldn't be related unless it was a tube compressor/limiting doing both.

Slamming the tape? Aural Exciter? Harmonizer? Tube compressor? Other? Anybody have an idea what it might be ??
 
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Digital Fuzz? LoL Uh, no. That was a rarity back in 1980 time frame since digital gear and buffering was rare during that era. Digital sounds much harsher. That is generally the effect I'm referring to however, the analog harmonic/hair sheen on the track. There's some overdone pumping as well but the two wouldn't be related unless it was a tube compressor/limiting doing both.

Slamming the tape? Aural Exciter? Harmonizer? Tube compressor? Other? Anybody have an idea what it might be ??

I mean, I get that obviously Dio wasn't using a lot of digital clipping. It sounds like some kind of clipping, but I don't know of any analog clipping like that.

I guess the way to experiment would be to dime everything in your signal chain one at a time until you find one that you like!
 
It took me a few minutes to find out that Vivian Campbell was using a les paul into a marshall jcm 800, with a distortion pedal possibly a boss ds-10 which was popular back then. The harmonizer thing i mentioned above was an effect that gave what i called an "LA" (west coast) guitar sound-a larger than life sound that wasn't chorus but had a similar effect in making the guitar sound bigger. The eventide harmonizer was invented in the mid 70's and by the 80's it was something that was likely in alot of big studios. The way it was used was to add a pitch a few cents lower and/or higher than the incoming. It's a sound that is almost hard to pinpoint what it is. Here's an example. Eventide still sells the effect in pedal and plugin form.

YouTube
 
The sound isn't a guitar chain thing, it is a recording/production aspect. It is found on a number of different albums with various players, the common denominator being the time period and most of the same producers.

I suspect it's probably not a harmonizer but am keeping an open mind on that possibility.

Here, listen at 1:50 when the drums stop, you can hear rather clearly there is something extra-ordinary happening on the guitar tracks (actually it's all over the entire song, tricks your ears into thinking it's part of the natural guitar amp)
< Argh the forum won't let me post a link yet.....access the studio version of Neon Knights by Sabbath on YouTube >
 
Not really sure which part of the sound you're really trying to pin down. The most commonly used effects on those tunes are filter/modulators in pedal form and drive pedals. Either one of these will add that high end buzz, printing to tape killed a lot of the nasty part of it and allowed it to sound good. While were on the subject, the late 70s and early eighties were tape delay heaven also, including tape flange effects.
 
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