MUSIC: Hey Joe by Patti Smith
# Hey, Joe
# Where you going with that
# Gun in your hand? #
London is a special place for me.
In '76, when I first came here,
playing guitar with the then unknown Patti Smith,
the review in the NME and the Whistle Test,
with me flipping out on guitar,
was the moment it all took off for us.
MUSIC: Hey Joe by Patti Smith
Back then, we were on a kind of mission to save rock and roll,
to make it primal and exciting again.
So many records, so little time.
Kind of the story of my life.
Yes!
I didn't look like that in 1977, but who did?
Like me...
every guitarist...
is in search of their own sound...
MUSIC: Bellbottoms by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
..that uniquely expresses their feelings
and connects them to the world.
And it doesn't stop with your guitar.
It's amps, pedals, electronic gizmos,
or even just a plectrum or slide on your finger.
This isn't just about who can play the fastest or the best.
TOGETHER: Excellent! GUITAR RIFF
I'm talking about the decades-long search for new guitar sounds,
the innovations that made the guitar sound completely different,
touched the zeitgeist,
and took popular music to entirely new places.
This is my guide to some of the extraordinary moments
where guitarists have changed the game, the feeling,
and, by opening a new door in music, kind of changed the world.
MUSIC: I'm In Love With A German Film Star by The Passions
The thing you have to bear in mind with guitar sounds
is we didn't always have the options we have now,
and you could argue that all of rock and roll was kick-started
by the moment someone tried to turn this into this.
THUNDERCLAP
Electricity was the key.
For the best part of 60 years,
pop's primary instrument has been the electric guitar...
..and Leo Fender and Les Paul were the guys who changed the world.
Post-war, they were grappling with the fact
guitarists couldn't be heard in an orchestra or a dance band,
and they looked for ways to amplify the guitar.
The brilliant thing that Les Paul did
was took the available technologies of the time
and turned them into something entirely new.
MUSIC: Caravan by Les Paul
He didn't follow the rules.
He just was a mad scientist at work.
It's very kind of Futurama.
DISTORTED VOICE: Don't tell Leo Fender about this.
A science experiment with rock and roll.
HE STRUMS ACROSS THE STRINGS
It's truly amazing that you can take a phonograph needle...
..stick it in a guitar and run it into an amplifier
and have it be the electric guitar.
HE PLAYS GUITAR
It's alive! It's alive!
Eventually, Les and Leo Fender created solid-body guitars.
Les's first one was just called The Log.
But it was what Les would do with the guitar
and the sounds he would create that would make him
the true pioneer of the new electric guitar.
MUSIC: Hawaiian War Chant by Les Paul and Mary Ford
He had a groove.
Although he was a mad scientist, at the same time,
him and his wife together created
a real toe-tapping, happy, '50s, euphoric moment.
# Somewhere there's music
# How faint the tune
# Somewhere there's heaven
# How high the moon
# There is no moon above when love is far away... #
It's the sound of Southern California,
husband and wife sleeping in separate twin beds.
You know, I mean, it harkens back to a bygone era.
# Where there's heaven It's where you are... #
The way they had their house rigged for sound,
she'd be up doing the dishes,
singing harmony parts to track on headphones,
with him in the basement playing the parts and recording.
Hello, there. Hi.
You know, Father Time was the main reason we built our studio
as part of the house.
Otherwise, we'd never have any home life, with radio
or Capitol Records, and now meeting you on television. That's for sure.
I've been kicking shine around, so let's do it. All right.
HE PLAYS GUITAR
They looked like your neighbours, they acted like your neighbours.
There was nothing about them that gave a whiff of showbiz.
That was a Trojan horse.
You could get that in. Boom!
MUSIC: Hawaiian War Chant by Les Paul and Mary Ford
In the early '50s, what Les was working on
in his home studio was the first form of multitrack recording,
layering multiple sounds of Mary's voice and his guitar
at different speeds to produce a totally modern sound.
They take advantage of the trick
that you can record one part of a song
and then you can play it back to yourself,
and then you can accompany that part and keep on recording.
We turn the tape machines on.
This is an early '50s Ampex 350 deck
and a Les Paul guitar.
It's just a standard, regular Ampex tape machine. Mm-hm.
Right now, we're on low speed.
So, I'm just going to record a little song
at half speed on the tape machine,
and half speed as I'm playing it. That's the tricky part.
And, we play the first part on the guitar. This is the rhythm part.
HE PLAYS GUITAR
Once he'd recorded it at low speed,
Les would play it back at high speed
to get an extraterrestrial-sounding guitar...
RECORDING PLAYS AT HIGHER SPEED
..while adding another guitar into the mix.
HE PLAYS GUITAR OVER RECORDING
He made the guitar, sonically, truly electric.
It didn't sound like an acoustic guitar,
making it sound like no other instrument in existence.
A futuristic guitar, fitting perfectly
with the '50s spirit of breakthrough technology and design.
ADVERT: This is the kitchen of tomorrow,
a press-button dream coming true for Mrs Housewife.
# Jealous of the tick-tock on the shelf
# Even getting jealous of myself... #
And the sound of fourteen top ten hits in just five years.
MUSIC: Jealous by Les Paul and Mary Ford
In the '50s, if you didn't have Les's home studio
or a magic tape machine, it was just you and the guitar.
Not much you could do in terms of making new sounds.
HE PLAYS A CHORD
But what if you did this with the volume control?
PLAYS CHORD AND OSCILLATES VOLUME
Mm, sounds pretty interesting.
And that sound was what inspired the first guitar pedal.
MUSIC: Come Softly To Me by Chet Atkins
The tremolo is a beautiful thing.
It lilts like a human vibrato.
# Come softly, darling... #
But instead of just taking a note up and down...
# ..darling... #
..it takes it in and out of volume,
so it's creating this mysterious, ethereal,
magical, floating sensation.
# Darling
# Come softly... #
This is the first tremolo and it's a mechanical device,
where they had a tiny little thing filled with mercury
that they would send the guitar signal through,
and then a motor that would jiggle that thing.
When you turn it on, you can hear this thing...
MACHINE JIGGLES ..jiggling like that.
I just love the way these things sound.
PLAYS NOTE THROUGH TREMOLO
Adjust the speed.
PLAYS NOTE WITH INCREASED TREMOLO
It's really kind of a one-trick pony, but it's a beautiful trick.
MUSIC: Bo's Bounce by Bo Diddley
Most guitarists use tremolo at a slow speed
to give a dreamy, lilting feel.
But Bo Diddley, a Mississippi blues man,
with his own home-made guitars,
used tremolo at a fast speed to create a very different effect.
He would tune his guitar to an open chord
and without the tremolo on it...
HE PLAYS GUITAR
..it just sounds like a guitar really.
PLAYS SAME TUNE WITH TREMOLO
Watch the technique of Bo Diddley!
SCREAMING
Bo's very first single topped the R&B charts.
For young white America,
that dance beat and tremolo shake was a truly new rock and roll sound.
MUSIC: Hey Bo Diddley by Bo Diddley
# Hey, Bo Diddley
# Hey, Bo Diddley... #
A Bo Diddley beat is physical
and it's bringing people together.
I'm doing something that's affecting the world that I live in.
# She rustled and tustled like Buffalo Bill
# Hey, Bo Diddley... #
Bo Diddley has this subversion to him.
He's overtly sexual and overtly seductive.
You know, that rhythm is so elemental.
You really can feel the bedsprings moving up and down.
# Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley, have you heard...? #
You have Elvis recording it in '54,
but he was kind of a small, regional act until '56.
And Bo Diddley had this huge national hit with Bo Diddley,
his first record, in 1955, so really,
as far as, like, a national consciousness
of what rock and roll was all about, it was this scary Bo Diddley guy.
He was the first thing that a lot of these people saw.
MUSIC: Bo Diddley by Bo Diddley
Back in the day, there was another way you could change your sound -
the tremolo arm or the whammy bar.
The way it works is it slackens the strings.
NOTE DEEPENS
..or tightens them. NOTE RISES
And there was one guy who made that sound his own.
ELECTRIC GUITAR PLAYS
When I was 12, my dad got tired of shovelling snow everywhere,
so he wanted to go where it was warm,
either Florida or Arizona,
and I said, "Arizona, please.
"I want to get out there and see those cowboys and Indians."
MUSIC: Because They're Young by Duane Eddy
It was pretty flat. It was desert.
I had bought my guitar at this music store called Ziggie's,
and Ziggie was a great guy. He was a musician's friend.
Ziggie said, "I've got something you might like."
And he put this guitar in my hands
and I thought, "Oh, man."
It settles in there so nice, and the neck on it was a dream.
And it had this bar, this vibrato,
which I could go...
HE PLAYS A NOTE WITH VIBRATO
HE PLAYS WITH VIBRATO
..which I could use to great effect on...
HE PLAYS INTRO TO PETER GUNN
MUSIC: Peter Gunn by Duane Eddy
Duane Eddy is the danger in the neighbourhood.
GLASS SMASHES
It conjures up a sneaky walk.
He is the leather jacket, a knife fighter.
Something excitingly dangerous.
And it's put into sound.
SHE SHRIEKS
I get mental pictures sometimes,
like the group of bad guys coming down the alley toward me
with their chains and their knives, switchblades and everything.
Rock and roll, at the time Duane was coming out,
was starting to move into a safe era.
It's a time of teen idols, the great Philadelphia triumvirate
of Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon and Fabian,
that were nonthreatening.
I think Duane's sensibilities, staying on those low strings
that have a kind of ominous quality to them,
gave a sense of threat to rock and roll.
HE PLAYS PETER GUNN
You know, there's a break in the middle of it.
That was a new thing in recording, back in those days.
You know, finish the song and then start it up again, you know.
Duane didn't just have twang and bend,
he had a big guitar sound.
And recording in Arizona, they found their own way of doing that.
They got their reverb from a water tank.
MUSIC: Rebel Rouser by Duane Eddy
The 2,000-gallon water tank.
Twenty feet long, probably eight feet high and round.
Put a speaker in one end and we'd send the sound out,
it would go out and come out that speaker,
swirl around the tank
and into the mic at the other end, and we had our echo.
By '59, Duane was the man with the golden arm...
..a new type of guitar player,
who ushered in an era of guitar instrumentals.
Cue The Ventures,
Link Wray, and your own Hank Marvin,
who evoked wide-open vistas
and brought a sense of freedom and escape to British rock and roll.
MUSIC: FBI by The Shadows
Hank's sound prevailed for years,
until, in the mid-'60s,
a younger generation, reared on Hank, staged a sonic revolution.
It's 1964,
and there's still not a lot of new guitar sounds in the air.
But it's the Beatles who everyone is listening to
and taking inspiration from.
And when the Beatles come to New York City,
in February of 1964, to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show,
and presents George Harrison with one of the first production models
of the electric 12-string.
# It's been a hard day's night
# And I've been working like a dog... #
The 12-string gives you
an extra six strings.
The bottom four strings are in octaves.
HE PLAYS BOTTOM FOUR STRINGS
And the top two strings are in unison.
HE PLAYS TOP TWO STRINGS
And taken all together...
PLAYS A CHORD
..they can ring your bell.
And in Los Angeles,
one fledgling folk group took such inspiration
from that Beatles film,
that they changed their haircuts and instruments
and built a whole career on that look and guitar sound.
Seeing the movie A Hard Day's Night, and taking notes
on what the Beatles were playing, so that's how we knew what to get.
And I traded in my acoustic 12-string
that Bobby Darin had given me,
and a five-string long neck Pete Seeger-style banjo
and some cash, and got a Rickenbacker electric 12.
It was like getting a new car. I mean, it was exciting.
I took it to bed with me. I played it all day long, eight hours a day.
The neck is very thin, so in order to play certain chords,
you can't play them the way you used to.
Like an E minor chord, I play with one finger.
PLAYS CHORD
And an A chord, I play with two fingers...
PLAYS CHORD ..instead of three.
This is called Hey, Mr Tambourine Man,
Please Play A Song For Me.
And in '65, there was one song doing the rounds
by a young folk singer, Bob Dylan, that was offered to The Byrds,
but met with resistance from rhythm guitarist David Crosby.
# Hey, Mr Tambourine Man
# Play a song for me.... #
My manager, Jim Dickson, was convinced that it was a hit.
Crosby hated it. He said, "I don't like it, man.
"That folky two-four time, it's five minutes long."
AM radio wouldn't play anything over 2 minutes and 30 seconds.
# In the jingle jangle morning
# I'll come following you... #
I had an idea of how to fix it up. I'd learned how to play...
HE PLAYS JESU, JOY OF MAN'S DESIRING
..from Pete Seeger's Goofing-Off Suite.
It's Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring.
And I thought, "What if I took some of that
"and put it as an intro for Mr Tambourine Man?"
HE PLAYS INTRO TO MR TAMBOURINE MAN
Right, straight out of Bach.
MUSIC: Mr Tambourine Man by The Byrds
HE PLAYS INTRO TO MR TAMBOURINE MAN
# Hey, Mr Tambourine Man
# Play a song for me... #
Cut it down to one verse, for time.
Got it down to 2 minutes and 16 seconds,
and it became a number one in 13 countries.
# Hey, Mr Tambourine Man
# Play a song for me
# In the jingle jangle... #
Dylan's "jingle jangle" line became the phrase
that summed up this new sound and idea of folk-rock.
# Take me for a trip
# Upon your magic swirling ship
# All my senses... #
The sound of the 12-string really cut through on AM radio.
I think it was a unique sound.
It was something that hadn't been heard before.
# I'll come following you... #
The thing about the electric 12-string
is that it gives a sense of sparkle
to any particular chord you play.
HE PLAYS SERIES OF CHORDS
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
And it wasn't just sparkle.
As Roger would discover on Eight Miles High,
the 12-string could channel Indian music and free jazz.
MUSIC: Eight Miles High by The Byrds
I'd bought a Philips cassette recorder in London
and we had it on a bus tour plugged into an amplifier.
We'd been listening to Ravi Shankar on one side
and flipped it over and listened to John Coltrane for a month,
and that's the only music we listened to,
so by the time we got back in the studio in LA,
it just came out like that.
HE PLAYS INTRO TO EIGHT MILES HIGH
MUSIC: Eight Miles High by The Byrds
In the '60s, you had a decade
that was so full of hope and celestial elevation.
Hearing the electric 12-string gave it a sense of soaring possibility.
# Eight miles high
# And when you touch down... #
David Crosby always wanted to be the guy dropping his pants,
saying, "Let's get high and break that boundary in song."
And you have McGuinn, who wants to write about planes.
It's a song about a trip to England.
Yeah, it's really about an aeroplane ride and when you get there,
the cultural shock, it's different from the US.
Street signs are up on the sides of buildings
instead of on little poles.
People in the rain. "Rain-grey town, known for its sound", London.
It's about a trip to England.
# Rain-grey town
# Known for its sound... #
This song is one of rock's first great double entendres.
When the radio stations got hold of it, they did the math and said,
"Wait a minute, commercial airliners don't fly eight miles high.
"They must be talking about some other kind of high, man."
So, they banned it. It was one of the first songs...
Censorship. They wiped it off the air.
But uplift and higher consciousness was just one side of the '60s.
There was another darker, dirtier side.
MUSIC: You Really Got me by The Kinks
Guitarists had experimented with slashing speakers
to get distorted sound.
But in the mid-'60s,
this shop was the first in Britain to sell a new guitar pedal,
that, at the touch of a button, unleashed something unforgettable.
That's quite an assemblage of sound enhancers.
Yeah, well, you know, when someone comes in the shop
and I demo one of these Fuzz pedals now,
it's pretty mind-blowing.
But what it must have been like
in 1965... The only stomp boxes really being used
were things like tremolo, a bit of tape delay. Mm-hm.
People were really into clean sounds, like The Shadows were.
Yeah, very clean. That was the sought-after tone.
So when this came along...
I guess my dad would say, "Have you heard this, mate?"
And they'd sit down and suddenly, their life would go from clean...
to GRRR!
Fuzz had been around for a couple of years,
but to get that sound to go big,
it took a certain player with a certain lyric at a certain time.
MUSIC: Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones
# I can't get no
# Satisfaction
# I can't get no
# Satisfaction
# Cos I try and I try
# And I try and I try
# I can't get no... #
That Keith riff is heavy and grungy and nasty and dirty.
They were the baby-boomer, post-war generation.
They wanted to have an experience different from their parents.
I've never heard anything like it.
I went to see them
at Long Beach Arena when I was 15. They were playing live,
and I remember just waiting till that record came on.
# Hey, hey, hey... #
Then I went and got the 45 and just played it till it turned grey.
Five girls sprinted towards their idols before police intervened.
Said the girls, though, "It was worth it."
The dangerousness of it is evocative.
Every night, when I turn on my guitar,
I get the same sense of power and abandon and sex and fury.
And it's the same feeling I got when I heard Satisfaction as a kid.
# No satisfaction... #
This Fuzz was given away in a competition
and the competition was in Beat Instrumental in 1965.
It was about the song Satisfaction. Whoa.
You had to say what was important about the song.
Was it mix, vocals, the Fuzz sound, the lyrics, Mick's trousers?
I don't know. And you had to put them in order.
Add all these years later,
I got this one back from the guy who won it in the magazine. Whoa.
So, that's one of my most prized possessions.
Of course, the winning answer was the use of Fuzz-Box.
MUSIC: Keep On Running by The Spencer Davis Group
1965, the annus mirabilis,
the miracle year for new guitar sounds.
The Stones release Satisfaction,
The Byrds release Mr Tambourine Man,
and The Who are about to take us on a sonic journey with this.
HE PLAYS A CHORD WITH REVERB
As a young American producer,
Shel Talmy became the first to tame the extraordinary sound of feedback
on a hit record and light a very British, very male touchpaper.
MUSIC: I Can't Explain by The Who
I was asked to go and see The Who,
and they were playing at a church hall.
# Got a feeling inside
# Can't explain... #
It took about maybe eight bars
to say, "Yes, I'll sign them."
# Dizzy in the head and I'm feeling blue
# The things you've said Well, maybe they're true... #
They were the best, rockiest rock and roll bunch
that could play music that I'd heard.
# Can't explain, I think it's love
# Try to say it to you when I feel blue
# Can't explain... #
Pete was always very smart,
had, at that point in time, kind of a chip on his shoulder.
Daltrey had maybe two chips on his shoulder,
Entwistle hardly spoke at all,
and Moony was the best rock and roll drummer there ever was.
# Can't explain... #
HE PLAYS CHORD
Sound had gotten so perfect
by '64, '65.
Those Beatles singles,
which is the peak of recorded sound, of excellence.
But it was time we are taking this and we're going to wreck it.
# I could go anyway Way I choose
# I could live anyhow Win or lose
# I could go anywhere For something new
# Anyway, anyhow, anywhere I choose
# Do anything... #
There was a meter,
a VU meter, it was called,
and it had the red line, and you were not supposed to go
past the red line because that allegedly took you into distortion.
GUITAR DISTORTION
They weren't afraid to cross the line.
There is a section...of cacophony.
They don't keep it going straight through,
and it just adds a little touch of obnoxiousness.
SHEL TALMY: Feedback was brand-new because nobody had worked out
how to record the feedback
without the entire record sounding distorted.
I used four different mics,
so it would pick up the distortion that was bouncing around the room.
Pete had this great thing. He would do the morse code on his guitar.
One pick-up on, one pick-up off.
HE IMITATES PETE TOWNSHEND'S STYLE
Then, of course, he'd take his pick and he would go...
SLIDES PICK
MUSIC: Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere by The Who
And Pete Townshend also recognised the potential
of pushing sound effect to the point of destruction and anarchy.
# The way I choose... #
It was almost like once the feedback happened,
you knew that that was the starting point
for something to get smashed.
MUSIC: My Generation by The Who
Our actual intention is to play out all the adrenaline
and all the aggression and show the audience
that you are a frustrated character,
that you do want to get something out of your system
and you do want to do it in front of them,
and it's got much more to do with art and music than people imagine.
It's the moment where the guitar moves away, almost totally,
from playing rhythm.
It moves into effect,
sonic possibilities that are beyond music.
You realise that you can do anything with the guitar
and it will be read as music.
CHEERING
On drums, Mitch Mitchell.
On bass, Noel Redding.
On guitar, Jimi Hendrix.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
I must say, in the true '60s sense of blowing one's mind,
I cannot believe that I'm in Jimi Hendrix's bedroom.
MUSIC: All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix
A beautiful story that Patti Smith once told me
about when she was invited to the opening of Electric Lady Studios.
She was on the stairs and he came upstairs,
and he was uncomfortable with the party
and she was a little uncomfortable.
And he talked to her about the universal language of music.
That's what he was hoping to achieve.
MUSIC: All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix
The Star Spangled Banner was his start
of taking huge amplifier stacks
that would just give an amazing amount of feedback,
the Fuzz-Tone, the whammy bar,
and combine them into something entirely new.
HE PLAYS THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER
Amplification started to come in and he took full advantage.
He had six cabinets with three stacks,
and then he leveraged it into something extraordinary.
At that volume, everything becomes alive.
HE PLAYS RUN OF NOTES
Something like that doesn't sound like much.
But with the set-up that Jimi Hendrix had,
something like that was like a screaming apocalyptic sound
that freaked all the hippies out.
DISTORTED ELECTRIC GUITAR
There was something awry in America at this stage.
It was the Vietnam War.
He would evoke dive bombs,
aeroplanes, everything, you know.
Sounds that make you feel like you're in a war...
..which is so completely meaningful for the time.
People forget that Jimi Hendrix and his bass player, Billy Cox,
were both paratroopers and they met in the Army.
HE PLAYS THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER
I think it's the sad resignation of
"Look at our country, look where we're at."
The conflict between generations,
the conflict between men and women, all of that was in his version.
You know, look where I'm at.
I'm a superstar, but I can't eat where I want,
I can't drink where I want.
that it was indelible.
The beautiful dichotomy of America.
HE PLAYS THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER
MUSIC: Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix
One thing that Jimmy also used that day
and pioneered is one of these,
a wah-wah pedal.
Think of Voodoo Child.
HE PLAYS RIFF FROM VOODOO CHILD
That riff sets up the whole character of the song.
It's still iconic today.
You hear those four bars and, yes, you are a voo-dude.
What it gave you was a completely new sound for the guitar.
No pedal, and it sounds like this...
HE PLAYS RIFF FROM VOODOO CHILD WITH NO PEDAL
Add the pedal, and it's a whole different animal.
HE PLAYS SAME RIFF WITH WAH-WAH PEDAL
MUSIC: Stir It Up by Bob Marley & The Wailers
Wah-wah was just a way of using your foot
to roll your guitar's tone control from bass to treble,
from muffled to bright.
Before the pedal itself, you'd have to do the tone knob on your own.
But you could hardly play anything else at the same time.
It can give your riff a talking affect.
Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
HE MOUTHS OVER GUITAR'S WAH-WAH SOUND
Almost, almost like a big duck.
And in '71, wah-wah would cement its place in pop culture
on a movie soundtrack -
a kind of black update of Peter Gunn.
When you think of the theme from Shaft...
MUSIC: Theme from Shaft
..it defined a kind of urban soundscape.
A lot of TV shows,
when they wanted to signify
you were in an urban environment, they would have the guitar player
play a wah-wah thing to let you know,
oh, you're in the ghetto now, cos you're hearing wah-wah.
CAR HORN BEEPS Go on! Get out of the way!
There isn't a discernible chord.
It's almost like you get the sound of the wah-wah itself
but without the notes bringing out. It's "waka, waka, waka."
MUSIC: Theme from Shaft
If wah-wah gave guitar a voice-like effect...
GUITAR MANIPULATED THROUGH TALK BOX
..in '75, Peter Frampton took it one step further.
His talk box had a tiny speaker that sent the sound of the guitar
up a tube into his mouth where Frampton could manipulate the sound
and speak the guitar back into his mic.
A year later, jazz guitarist George Benson...
HE SCATS OVER GUITAR
..had his own take on the idea,
crossing over into the pop mainstream,
by perfectly melding his scat singing with his playing.
HE SCATS OVER GUITAR
Throughout the decade, the appetite for guitar heroes kept growing.
From Kossoff to Clapton to Gilmour, Page and Santana,
the roll call got as long as their 98-bar solos.
And toward the end of the '70s, rock found a new guitar sound
The speed shredders.
This was about how fast you could play
and how many notes you could cram into a song
and, sometimes, how big your hair was.
I have to say that some of these guitar players -
Eddie Van Halen, Uli Roth -
they took the machine that we call a guitar
to a whole new level of intensity.
MUSIC: The Sails Of Charon by Scorpions
They called me "father of the shredder"
or something like that.
Some people get very excited by fast playing, you know.
When I started playing guitar,
it was a very exciting time for guitar
because you had Eric Clapton and then you had Jimi Hendrix.
You had people like Jeff Beck already,
and they were pushing the envelope,
but a lot of their playing was basically pentatonic,
meaning they were using, like, five notes.
One, two, three, four, five.
The sixth note is the same as the root note,
so that's completely different from classical music.
Basically, you work with classical scales,
like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
So, in the Scorpions, I started bringing that stuff in,
but then I thought, "Well, why not do two octaves
"instead of, erm, instead of one?"
HE PLAYS NOTES ACROSS TWO OCTAVES
Or more? HE RUNS THROUGH SEVERAL OCTAVES
Or, you know... HE RUNS THROUGH SEVERAL OCTAVES
MUSIC: The Sails Of Charon by Scorpions
I tend to see music extremely visual,
a musical scale through the entire rainbow colours, you know.
From A to orange,
amber, you know, yellow,
it's different yellow,
going through the greens, then the blues...
HE PLAYS A FEW NOTES ..and then red again.
So, basically, an arpeggio...
HE PLAYS ARPEGGIOS
It's like moving through a rainbow of light and of energy.
And for some reason, we have the incredible ability
to translate every note directly into emotion.
All right,
the greatest rock and roll guitar player in the world,
Mr Eddie Van Halen.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
HE SHREDS GUITAR
By the early '80s,
Eddie Van Halen was filling stadiums with the sound of shredding...
..adding a touch of Hendrix whammy bar
and a technique called "tapping".
He would use his first finger and...
HE "TAPS" THE GUITAR
The culture of '80s hair metal got so big
that the sound of shredding...
TOGETHER: Excellent! GUITAR RIFF
..came to sum up a whole way of life.
Where's the clerk? I know, I'll use the "May I help you?" riff.
HE PLAYS GUITAR RIFF
May I help you? Yes, my good man.
# Might as well jump Jump... #
In true '80s style... # Go ahead and jump... #
..shredding got bigger and brasher
and, like all '80s look-at-me excess, it went the extra mile.
MUSIC: Freight Train by Nitro
For me, it was extremely important, when playing fast,
to always play melodic.
It needed to be logical, understandable.
Somewhere along the line, with a lot of shredders,
that early bit of wisdom didn't make it to the finishing line,
you know, and I wish it did.
So, I kind of feel guilty, in some respects there, yeah.
MUSIC: Walking On The Moon by The Police
But it wasn't all about ego in the guitar Olympics.
It could be about less -
about mood, texture, spirit and the sublime.
The '70s had given us the watery sound of the chorus pedal,
used by The Police's Andy Summers.
Now, in the '80s, there was a new guitar sound, courtesy of this -
a digital, programmable delay machine
that could set the rate of your echo to a precise millisecond.
Second, second, second.
Second.
MUSIC: Where The Streets Have No Name by U2
When you look at U2 and The Edge,
working with this delay that he created,
this most inventive, simply, deceptively inventive sound,
it just brings so much more depth to it.
Cos I've been in a lot of U2 shows and seen them a lot.
It has such an effect on the audience
because I think it's almost feeling yourself echo back to yourself.
It's like your humanity is bouncing back on itself to itself.
One of the first things I discovered with echo was the opportunity
to use it in a rhythmic capacity.
If you change the delay time, like in a sine wave,
it's like a Doppler effect within the echo
and it can be a very nice sound.
So, this is the sound that I would use
for Where The Streets Have No Name.
HE PLAYS A LINE FROM WHERE STREETS HAVE NO NAME
Simple part. But when I add the echo...
HE PLAYS THE SAME LINE WITH ECHO
So, that's all about knowing how to get that sound out of the echo,
cos if, you know, if I'm not playing the right tempo or whatever,
you get a totally different result, so it's...
The two work off each other, totally.
MUSIC: Where The Streets Have No Name by U2
Playing rhythmically with echo,
almost like playing off a second musician, you know.
It's almost like a kind of conversation,
but the conversation, in this case, is between me and the echo.
# Oh-oh
# Where the streets have no name
# We're still building then burning down love
# Burning down love
# And when I go there
# I go there with you
# It's all I can do... #
And that all came out of the right echo setting for that song.
In fact, that's how the song started
was with the guitar part and the echo.
I love The Edge's playing and, to me,
I drew a line between Bo Diddley and The Edge and what they do,
because they're both having something
that, like, you know, scatters the notes.
Some of these are vintage. This is from, like, the early '80s.
This is just an echo machine.
The sound piles on itself.
It's a very sound-oriented way of playing.
We often think about the place that a song is coming from,
as much as what it's about.
And particularly on Joshua Tree,
that was the beginning of that conscious attempt
to try and evoke a location
and to use the echo to bring the listener somewhere.
MUSIC: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For by U2
The Edge wasn't the only '80s guitar player
to reach for something more spacey, evocative and cinematic.
In 1984, one movie soundtrack was entirely built on a guitar sound
that had been around for decades,
but caught on again,
as that sound was foregrounded and put up on the big screen.
MUSIC: Paris, Texas by Ry Cooder
When I first heard the slide,
I didn't quite know what I was hearing.
This kind of liquid kind of thing, and being fascinated by...
I don't know, it sounded like some siren or something.
My grandfather was a Methodist minister
and played hymns on a Hawaiian lap steel.
The sound of it was just so haunting.
There's nothing more evocative and more emotional
and it just pierces me.
First thing I ever tried was to play with a pocketknife, so I thought,
"Wow, if I didn't stab myself, this was going to be pretty cool."
HE PLAYS GUITAR WITH SLIDE
HE HUMS ALONG TO THE GUITAR
That's what I learned with, but it's not so safe,
especially if you get drunk.
I fell in love with that sound, so I went in the medicine cabinet
and soaked off the label of a medicine bottle
and held it with these two fingers,
and that's what I use for my bottleneck.
# Don't have to humble yourself to me
# I ain't your judge or your king... #
I think one of the things
that's most expressive and powerful about slide
is that the emptier the music is behind it,
the more the band drops out,
the more the tone of it and the emotion of it
and the vibrato of it can really sail.
In the breakdowns of songs,
I know that I can continue the emotion that I set up in my verse.
You can keep it going in a way
where you'd run out of breath if you were just singing.
I feel it's about dredging up what you can from your soul.
The closer you get down to the well down there,
I think the more real it gets.
Even in one note, you can go...
HE PLAYS NOTE WITH SLIDE
You know, you can feel something.
For me, you can like...
..you know, hit it, you know.
It's like how you punch it, you know.
HE PLAYS AND HUMS ALONG TO GUITAR
# I don't want a lover
# I just need a friend... #
The revival of slide in the '80s and early '90s
marked a moment when pop music looked beyond the studio sounds
of drum machines, Fairlights and keytars
and found something forgotten and authentic in acoustic sound.
All of a sudden, they're playing blues and slide,
and all the people thought it was brand-new.
But it wasn't.
I'll tell you something, but this was in the '90s,
and I was playing slide.
These kids, teenagers or whatever, I don't know, college kids,
come up to me and asking what was on my finger.
They had never seen a slide.
# Hey, yes, my mamma told me... #
It was great to have a swing back to organic roots music.
# But my daddy didn't tell me, Lord
# What the man was putting down
# It got me in the mood... #
I already sold a million copies
by the time I got nominated for a Grammy,
and then I won all those Grammys in one night,
so it shot the record up to number one and changed my life.
MUSIC: Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine
But the evolution of guitar sounds never stands still.
The '90s and millennium saw guitar pedals hit the digital age.
Rage Against The Machine using the octave-shifting whammy pedal.
# They're the chosen whites Come on... #
And you could get Fuzz pedals in as many varieties
as there are days of the year.
But distortion and squeal wasn't the whole picture.
# Talking in my sleep
# And I'm making myself crazy
# Out of my mind Out of my mind... #
And there was one pedal that was designed for electric guitar
but became something else when it was picked up by a busker,
offering infinite possibilities for a one-person band.
# She makes you feel like nobody else
# Nobody else... #
My worst ever day of busking in Glasgow,
a bagpiper set up directly opposite me.
It was tense.
MUSIC: Refugee by Oi Va Voi
Busking, for me, was a training ground
in learning to be a percussive player,
so that you're actually kind of sounding like a band,
and it was also a real training, in terms of getting people's attention.
MUSIC: Refugee by Oi Va Voi
I made my first records, I didn't have a band in the studio,
it was just me and a drummer.
The loop pedal came about...
I recorded that album and I was a guest vocalist
in a Jewish band called Oi Va Voi.
Their sound guy, who is called Moshik,
we were rehearsing one day, I was playing him some of my stuff.
He was, like, "It's so cool."
I said, "Yeah, but I can't afford to pay a band
"and I've got to go out and play this record that I've made
"and I really like it, but I cannot play just girl and guitar any more.
"It's boring to me."
And he said, "Oh, I've got this loop pedal in my bag."
It's this pedal, it's the same one. I haven't changed up.
Black Horse And The Cherry Tree was basically me learning
how to use the loop pedal.
So, the record button, you put in what you want to put in.
SHE BEATS HER GUITAR
MACHINE PLAYS BACK BEATS
So, the play button stops it and you start the loop.
So, that's your basic loop.
The album was all finished
and the Later With Jools scout team came over to a rehearsal
and my label boss said, "Play them that "woohoo" thing."
And I said, "But it's not on the record.
"Shouldn't I play something from the album?"
He was like, "No, just play that. Trust me."
Let's introduce somebody new, making their television debut.
From St Andrews in Scotland, please welcome KT Tunstall.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I'd never been on TV before, and I was on the show
with Anita Baker, Jackson Browne and The Cure, which was insane.
MUSIC: Black Horse And The Cherry Tree
I was just trying to find as many different sounds as possible
to try and build the loop...
# Whoohoo... #
..into what would sound like a full band.
So, using claps, using backing vocals, using the tambourine.
# Whoohoo
# Whoohoo... #
It was fantastic to have playing something be the reason
that you become...famous.
# Whoohoo
# Well, my heart knows me better than I know myself
# So I'm gonna let it do all the talking
# Whoohoo, whoohoo
# I came across a place in the middle of nowhere
# With a big black horse and a cherry tree
# Whoohoo... #
And I think people were excited to see a girl playing with tech.
It's not, it's not common.
# Whoohoo
# Well, there was a big black horse
# And a cherry tree
# I can't quite get there cos my heart's forsaken me... #
It was a massive surprise what happened after Later.
I was running my own website at the time,
and I would get a few e-mails a day,
and I just woke up to reams of e-mails from people who'd found me.
# Whoohoo No, no, no, no... #
..saying how inspired they were, how much they loved it.
# Big black horse... #
And they had an online poll for that episode, and I won it.
And I was, like, "But The Cure... What?!"
# ..and a cherry tree
# I can't quite get there cos my heart's forsaken me. #
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Black Horse And The Cherry Tree. The wonderful KT Tunstall.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In recent years,
Ed Sheeran adopted KT's technique and took it to another level.
MUSIC: Bloodstream by Ed Sheeran
It's kind of the perfect guitar style for a post-crash society.
Just one player and a looper pedal
sells out whole stadiums around the world.
# Tell me when it kicks in... #
In a sense, everything has gone back to Les Paul.
That's what he was doing -
recording himself and playing back with himself.
As a guitarist and musician, I look to the future
and celebrate the breakthroughs we keep making
and the pop music that results.
It's the soundtrack of our lives.
# Horses, horses, horses, horses
# Do you know how to pony
# Like bony maroney?
# Do you know how to twist?
# Well, it goes like this It goes like this
# Baby mash potato
# Do the alligator Do the alligator... #