Genesis - Peter Gabriel vocal sound ...

  • Thread starter Thread starter gilwe
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I've owned The Lamb for 20 years now, and I still haven't been able to listen to it from start to finish - ever! And I sure as hell could never make sense out of that rambling 'concept' story. Rael.....schmael....

I'll take a dark, bleak afternoon and a copy of Wind and Wuthering anytime...
 
jeffree said:
I still throw The Yes Album or Close to the Edge on the burner every few months just to ground myself.
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Prog rock at it's finest. Doesn't get much better.
 
Close to the egde my fave, love that album, especially the title track.

My fave genesis would be foxtrot,just love the intro on watcher of the skies. mellotron rocks.
 
Genesis Rules!

As far as I'm concerned, Selling England by the Pound has always been the greatest prog rock album ever made. However, I've heard lots of people in the audiophile community bitch about the sound quality of that album on vinyl. Genesis packed so much music on that disc that I suppose there HAS to be quite a bit of compression going on. It has always sounded pretty good to me.

I'm glad that somebody mentioned Hackett's Watcher of the Skies. It's got some VERY good versions of some Genesis songs. I personally didn't care for the sound of many of the songs though. I mean, if you are going to go to all the trouble of using AN ACTUAL STRING SECTION, then you should at least make sure that it SOUNDS like real strings, rather than a string synthesizer. Right?

Somebody should also mention the "lost Genesis album," otherwise known as The Geese and the Ghost by Anthony Phillips. True, Anthony Phillips left the band in the REALLY early days, but it really does sound like a mid-70s era Genesis album.
 
Nakatira said:
Close to the egde my fave, love that album, especially the title track.
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All 17 minutes of it. Pure prog-rock brilliance.
 
Fontcow said:
However, the production on "A Trick of the Tail" (the first with Collins on lead vocals) is just freaking amazing. The opening surge of sound on the first song, "Squonk," is just blissful to the ears. :D
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Yes, Trick is an awesome record. One of the recording mags did a write up on that record and I've got it somewhere, just don't remember what mag. :(

I like Gabriel much more than Phil but he did Ok on Trick. Then things went down the toilet after that.
 
Sorry, Gilwe, that this thread has gotten so seriously off track... but you brought up such a sweet topic.

I remember first hearing those first 5 minutes of Edge and thinking, "what the xxxx?" Is it rock, or jazz, or improv, or ? That blistering lead guitar, soaring bass, off-beat drumming, sudden harmonies... I think my entire musical world shifted during those few minutes, and my own music has never been normal since. Genesis' Supper's Ready also had a strong impact, as did many of the Beatles' groundbreaking efforts. Moving on to Gentle Giant, Crimson, Flash, and the like eventually screwed me up for a lifetime.

Is anyone doing recording stuff like that anymore? On a lark, I just picked up Spock's Beard (V), which I've heard is in the prog-rock vein, and I'll give it a listen this week. I've heard the name Flower Kings, too, but no nothing more about them. Any of you folks have any prog gems to share--or are those grand days over, for better or worse?

J.
 
Yes, progressive rock lives on!

jeffree said:
Sorry, Gilwe, that this thread has gotten so seriously off track... but you brought up such a sweet topic.
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Yeah, it's obvious that this has gotten WAY off topic. But it's also obvious that lots of people are still really into good old fashioned progressive rock. And I think that's really cool. :)
jeffree said:
Is anyone doing recording stuff like that anymore? On a lark, I just picked up Spock's Beard (V), which I've heard is in the prog-rock vein, and I'll give it a listen this week. I've heard the name Flower Kings, too, but no nothing more about them. Any of you folks have any prog gems to share--or are those grand days over, for better or worse?
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Actually, YES, there are lots of bands playing prog these days. In fact, from what I understand, there's been something of a prog rock renaissance going on since about the mid-1990s. The problem is that a lot of the prog these days is prog-metal, which I don't much care for (unless it's King Crimson in one of their harder rock phases). Nevertheless, I've been checking out a lot of the new prog bands, and some of it's pretty good. Amazon just told me that they shipped out a CD that I ordered from the band IQ, which reportedly sounds a LOT like the 70s-era prog bands. The first Marillion (Fish era stuff) recordings is supposedly very much in the vein of Gabriel-era Genesis.

Part of the problem is that there are just SO MANY different sub-genres of prog, that you have to spend some time figuring out which TYPE of prog rock you like. There are literally dozens of sub-categories. But once you figure that out, there are plenty of artists to choose from. The web site Prog Archives says that "As today, the discography filed 7,774 titles from exactly 1,668 bands." Much of that is from new bands that didn't exist during the original heyday of prog. Plus, a lot of the old stuff is now available on CD. I've been buying LOTS of prog recently.

Here are some cool progressive rock web sites to check out:
http://www.progrock.com/
http://www.progradio.net/
http://www.progarchives.com/
http://www.proggnosis.com/

I, for one, think it's AWESOME that progressive rock seems to be alive and thriving in the 21st Century.
 
Let's come back to the original question:

I have noticed that Peter Gabriel uses often 2 microphones tape together (all the band does in a video I have seen), and I am wondering if this is a big part of the vocal sound.

Thanks
 
tenkas said:
Let's come back to the original question:

I have noticed that Peter Gabriel uses often 2 microphones tape together (all the band does in a video I have seen), and I am wondering if this is a big part of the vocal sound.

Thanks
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Well, I'm just guessing. I don't know for sure. But my hunch is that he probably had the two mics set so that the diaphragms didn't line up exactly even, giving him that slightly out of phase sound. Jimmy Page often used this same trick on his guitar cabs, from what I understand. Then again, he may have simply liked the sound of the two mics mixed together.

Or, as an alternate explanation, he may have had one set aside strictly for special effects. Remember that, in the 70s, you couldn't use MIDI to switch your eq and effects devices on in mid-song. He may have sent one to a separate channel to be set up for whatever weird sound effects he needed for a particular break in the song. Then, whenever that part of the song came on, the soundman muted the main vocal mic and unmuted the "fx mic." Remember that there were a lot of these weird vocal effects in the Gabriel-era Genesis songs. Of course, I don't have any idea why, if this is the reason for the two mics, they didn't simply mult the signal from the main mic and use THAT signal for the effects. Again, I'm just tossing some ideas out here.
 
therage! said:
I like Gabriel much more than Phil but he did Ok on Trick. Then things went down the toilet after that.
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I kinda' liked Phil up until Duke.

Then they started going full-force in to all of Phil's fluffy pop shit, which was too bad. Even then, I suppose there was still some good stuff on that one. But it was amazing how well Phil did standing in with them for a couple records there. Trick of the Tail didn't miss a beat at all. Ripples ... Entangled ... Squonk ... every bit as much the classics as their previous stuff was.
 
Excellent post, Brad. Thanks for sharing these great sites. I just listened to Spock's Beard's V last night and really enjoyed it--very progressive really, just a touch heavier at times, but the 70s' influence is everywhere. I had no idea that this type of music is still kicking so well.

J.
 
I'm glad this thread is up on this bulletin board. I am a Genesis fanatic. I like both the Peter and Phil eras equally as well (depending on the album) and I know their music well. I know their guitars, amps, effects well, too, but not the recording gear.

In my humble opinion. Nursery Cryme and Trespass sound a lot better than anything else from that era in terms of warmth and clarity.

The Lamb, which of course I love, to me always sounded very flat and dry. I read that the songs for that were written on the fly and Peter would run off to the other room to write lyrics bit by bit. It's possible the whole thing was rushed.

Seconds Out, to me, is a masterpiece. It sounds incredible in every way and the playing and singing is fantastic. Great song list also. Both eras are covered.

I could go on....but this thread started with Peter era stuff, so I'll leave out my thrilling musings on the Phil era stuff. I love almost all of it (up to Invisible Touch...which still has a few good pop tunes on it).

Long live Genesis!

LL
 
I not like the sound of Foxtrot even though it is one of mine faviourite Genesis albums.Suppers Ready is very great track.Duke doesn't sound that good either when compared to tRick of the tail.
 
Who's heard the 'Archives' live recording box set? It sounds absolutely tremendous: Lamb, Suppers Ready, Pound, it's all great.

Steve Hackett: What an innovator. How the hell people can talk about Vai and Halen without mentioning Hackett confounds me. SH's tapping technique was years ahead of either of them, technically and chronologically!

Probably well known among those here on this thread, but the RE fell asleep (!) towards the end of the Lamb show and let the reel run out, so IT (the final song) was lost, so the old lineup re-recorded it. It's pretty seamless.

Robin
 
robin watson said:
Who's heard the 'Archives' live recording box set? It sounds absolutely tremendous: Lamb, Suppers Ready, Pound, it's all great.

Steve Hackett: What an innovator. How the hell people can talk about Vai and Halen without mentioning Hackett confounds me. SH's tapping technique was years ahead of either of them, technically and chronologically!

Probably well known among those here on this thread, but the RE fell asleep (!) towards the end of the Lamb show and let the reel run out, so IT (the final song) was lost, so the old lineup re-recorded it. It's pretty seamless.

Robin
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Hi. If I understand your description properly, I have that box set. It's excellent. There's a lot of really good stuff on it. It's so cool that they put it out, because there's stuff on there, and good quality, I haven't exactly quite heard before.

About Hackett, even though I'm really a Mike Rutherford fanatic and wasn't ever a Hackett freak (to the same level of adoration), I must give credit to Hackett, too. His fingertapping, as you implied, was perfected years before Halen (who I love and respect) and was of a different flavor, too. Yet, Hackett largely remains ignored as one of the earlier (perhaps the only) innovator of this technique.

Back to the box set....if it's what I'm thinking about, like I said, there is a recording of some tune....it may be from Duke (I forget which tune it is exactly in the box set, but I do remember that it is from the late 70s/maybe '80) where Daryl Stuermer, believe it or not, blatantly fouls up for a whole small section of playing. I'm sure it's a mistake - maybe he's lost or something, but the version of the song is so good that it's on the box set. It's pretty interesting to hear. And Daryl is a really fantastic guitarist, too. I guess even he is mortal. It's cool that they left it in.

LL
 
Then I think we're talking about different box sets - mine being the earlier Gabriel stuff and yours being the next set to come out covering the Phil years, which I haven't got.
 
I think I have both box sets since it has all kinds of Peter stuff, too...

The material is all mixed together so I didn't know what came from what...

Then again, it could be one huge, different box set...I don't know....

LL
 
jeffree said:
Excellent post, Brad. Thanks for sharing these great sites. I just listened to Spock's Beard's V last night and really enjoyed it--very progressive really, just a touch heavier at times, but the 70s' influence is everywhere. I had no idea that this type of music is still kicking so well.
J.
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You're welcome. And I'm glad you're enjoying your new Spock's Beard disc. I haven't gotten around to getting any of their stuff, yet. I've only been sampling a few of the newer prog artists, and still haven't heard many of them. If you like that, you should probably also check out a band called Transatlantic, which was a modern day "supergroup" of prog, containing Neal Morse from Spock's Beard, along with alumni from The Flower Kings, Dream Theater, and Marillion. They only released a couple of studio albums (and a live recording or two) before breaking up. It's pretty good stuff.
 
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