With or Without You - - guitar

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dmbfan1981

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How were those volume swelled spacey guitars created?? ( Not the delayed guitar in the middle. I mean the guitar that accompanies the bass line in the beginning verse. )

Is it an Ebow? A fernandes sustainer guitar? A sustainer pedal?? Or just a guitar with the producer riding the levels?
 
None of those things.

From the July 1987 Guitar World:

On [With or Without You], I'm playing a Fender Stratocaster which I've modified to be used for a new device called the Infinite Guitar. It's not really produced, as such, it's an invention of a friend of mine named Michael Brooks, who I collaborated with on the Captive soundtrack. It does something similar to what an E-Bow does, but with a great deal more subtlety, and generally it's more useful than an E-Bow, which is either on or off–usually a wild sustain and then nothing, you know? With the Infinite, it's all different.
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I knew I was keeping all those back issues around for something.



Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
I thought this was about the beatles song.

There is a cool video of adrian belew playing it on youtube, but it's blocked from work now. "Within without you".
 
you need to check out the "Classic Albums, The Joshua Tree" dvd. there's a lot of great info on this and the other songs on this album, straight from the edge, daniel lanios and brian eno.

VH1 Classic has been broadcasting them a lot lately, so you might be able to catch an abbreviated version for free on VH1 Classic.


cheers,
wade
 
Light said:
None of those things.

From the July 1987 Guitar World:






I knew I was keeping all those back issues around for something.
Click to expand...

From Wikipedia:

"The Infinite Guitar was created by Michael Brook, as a way of allowing an electric guitar note to be held with infinite sustain (hence the name). It consists of an electronic circuit that takes the signal from a standard guitar pickup, amplifies it, and feeds it back into a separate pickup coil. When set up and used correctly, the result is a continuous sustained note that can be used as is, or treated to create new sounds or emulate traditional instruments.

In addition to his own instrument, based on a Tokai Strat copy, Brook produced two Infinite Guitars, one of which belongs to Daniel Lanois. The other belongs to The Edge of U2, who famously used it on "With or Without You" from 1987's The Joshua Tree.

The principle has been the subject of patent litigation in the past, and is currently available commercially in two forms, the Sustainiac and the Fernandes Sustainer."
 
cephus said:
I thought this was about the beatles song.

There is a cool video of adrian belew playing it on youtube, but it's blocked from work now. "Within without you".
Click to expand...

Haha - same here.
 
thanks guys, I had a pretty good suspicion that it was some kind of sustainer guitar like fernandes makes. The same effect is used on Dave Matthews' Some Devil Album on the track "Trouble." Dave apparently knows Daniel Lanois and frequently covers his song "The Maker." I wonder if they borrowed his infinite guitar for that.ha.

Does anyone know of a sustainer pedal that would emulate that without having to buying a specialty guitar devoted just to that? Thanks.
 
ALSO-- is THE EDGE sustaining each note and sliding to different notes as he works the volume on the guitar, or is he picking each note and using a volume pedal to acheive those swells??
 
dmbfan1981 said:
Does anyone know of a sustainer pedal that would emulate that without having to buying a specialty guitar devoted just to that? Thanks.
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Since the technology works by feeding back your signal to a transducer under the strings, there's no pedal that will do that. Compressor/sustain pedals can boost the gain as the string decays, but they bring the noise level up as well as they do that, and eventually the string decays to the point where there is nothing left for it to work with, so it's not "infinite".

An Ebow is a handheld unit that does sort of the same thing as the Infinite Guitar, but it's trickier to use and the effect is somewhat different.
 
Honestly, though, everybody needs an ebow. So fun! I can't find mine. :(

The main thing that differs between the ebow and the sound of "With Or Without You" is that the ebow really cranks the gain up on your pickup and always sounds like an overdriven guitar.
 
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