"...18 of them, each tuned differently, are taken on the road. Most are gutted and remade by the band, but Ranaldo and Moore generally start with Fenders: Tele Deluxes, Mustangs, Duosonics, a Jaguar and a Jazzmaster."

To summarize:

Terry would know which guitar went with which song and alter its volume and tone on the FOH mixing console to keep the sound balanced. He used a SoundCraft 800B 24:8:2 desk. Lee and Thurston each had a channel, and both changed their amp settings about 2 or 3 times during the show. Kim had two channels, one a DI before her wah and distortion pedals, and one a mic on the amp itself. The drums had two channels, as did the vocals.

Drawmer noise gates and Yamaha SPX 90 reverbs were used gently on the drums, and a Yamaha Rev 7 was used for vocal reverb, along with a Roland SDE3000 for very short vocal delay. BSS compressors were used on the vocals and bass DI.

The on-stage monitors used a SoundCraft 800B 24:8 desk. Peter Van de Velde ran this console, with similar effects to the FOH mix - Yamaha Rev 7 on Kim's vocal, Drawmer noise gate on the drums, BSS compressor on the bass DI, lead guitar, and all vocal mics. The six on stage wedges each contained 2 x 15" Electro Voice bass speakers and a 2" Beymer compression driver. The drum fill was a TM54 which used 15" and 10" Turbosound speakers and a 1" JBL compression driver while the side fills were two TM53 cabinets (also used in the FOH mix).

Note that this is just pertinent to the one show and may have all been venue supplied equipment, but it's interesting to see a feature on this side of the band's sound, particularly from relatively early in their career!

THURSTON: "We use guitars as tools. We do experiments on them. [smile] We torture them! On average, I use six different ones. I play as well with a Fender Jazz Master as with a Fender Jaguar. Also, a Fender Duo Sonic and a Drifter. They are all tuned differently. I admit I have a preference for the Jazz Master because of its size, among others. In fact, I don't like guitars for what they are, for the object they represent. Their sounds interest me, that's all. I'm not like Ricky Nelson. I do not collect them for their aesthetics. I connect them, in general, on a huge Marshall JCM 800. A distortion pedal is enough for me for the effects."

LEE: "I like Fender Jaguars. The new ones aren't that great, but the old ones are just beautiful to play, in terms of the action. And I like that Jaguar kind of tremolo bar that doesn't have any of the locking mechanism stuff that is so tedious to work with. But I don't usually like the pickups. So generally the first thing I will do to a Jaguar is change the pickups. I'm really partial to humbucking pickups, and I mostly play with the neck pickup, so the first thing I do when I get a guitar is put a humbucking pickup in the neck position."

LEE: "The other thing Thurston and I both like in a guitar is to have space behind the bridge, to be able to strum the strings back there. On one Jaguar I modified a few months ago, I even put a pickup there behind the bridge - a switchable pickup. So instead of a neck and a bridge pickup, there's a neck pickup and a pickup behind the bridge. And the sounds that come out of that are really incredible. It's limited in its uses, but it's really amazing anyway."

LEE: "We don't modify all our guitars though; we have many that we've never touched. We've got a couple of Strat copies that are really nice. Those Strat-style pickups are about the only single-coil pickups I like to play."

LEE: "One of my favorites is an early Seventies semi-hollow Fender Deluxe. It's the only guitar we have now that's been in the band since the beginning. We've also got a really old Gibson Firebird that's very nice."

LEE: "What I've been favoriing for the last few years is a pre-CBS Fender Super Reverb with four 10's that I've had for a long time. It was recently souped up by a guy here in New York named Harry Colby. The power's jumped from 40 watts to 65, and it now has a master volume, a much better reverb and heavy duty speakers."

THURSTON: "I think I have a Jaguar that I also use. But for some reason I like the Jazz Master pickups better than the Jaguar pickups. I also have one of those 335-style Gibson Epiphone guitars that I use every once in a while [?? I don't know what he's referring to!], and a Fender Duo Sonic. Actually, it's a Duo Sonic neck on a weird, modified Mustang body. We have a couple of funky guitars that have names that I forget - Japanese stuff, and some strange obscure East German guitar we bought in L.A. It's really cool."

THURSTON: "The best sound I've gotten so far is by using the Marshall 800 head - or something akin to it, like maybe one of those big Peavey 12-tube Roadmaster things - and sending it through a Turbo Rat. I use the Turbo Rat as a sort of EQ to the amp and then use an MXR distortion for overdrive. At the moment I have a 4 x 12 cabinet ganged with a 6 x 10. I'm not sure why I'm using that. We've gone through so many cabinets. It's just really difficult having so many different kinds of guitars. If I was a one-guitar person, it would be more cut-and-dried and I would probably get more involved with amplifiers and such."

LEE: "When we tour, we take along between 14 and 20 guitars between us, and lot of mine tend to be Fenders. My favorites, I suppose, are vintage Jaguars with modified pickups, humbucking pickups, and I've also got a pair of early 70's Fender Telecasters - Telecaster deluxes with humbuckers and semi-hollow bodies. Those are really nice guiars for certain kinds of things. I've also got a couple of Mustangs that I like, but if I had to choose one - if I could only have one guitar - it'd probably be a vintage Jaguar with humbucking pickups in the neck position."

THURSTON: "Mostly I use a Jazzmaster. I like the way it fits. It feels good."

LEE: "We've used a bunch of different amps. For recording, I use a Fender Super Reverb, which I've had souped-up by a guy named Harry Colby, here in New York, and it's got a vintage, pre-CBS Fender sound. I've also got a tiny Fender Princeton, a real old one, and we both use Peavey heads, which we couple with Marshall bottoms, which sound pretty good. When we think about the instrument, the instrument doesn't stop at being just the electric guitar; it's also the amp as well. I mean, feedback, which is an element we use to great effect in our music, is the immediate interaction of the guitar and the amp, and in a certain way, it's very symbolic of what electric guitar is all about. We spent a lot of time fine-tuning our amps, getting ones we liked and getting them to work right in relation to all the different guitars that we use."

THURSTON: "I don't use pedals beyond an MXR distortion box and a Turbo-Rat - and I don't really like using even that."

LEE: "I've got a Crybaby wah-wah, a Fender two-second digital delay, a Boss compressor, and a distortion box - I haven't set up my pedals in so long, I can't even remember what brand it is anymore."

LEE: "We don't use any standard guitar tunings. Some of them are straight, open chord tunings, but most of them are more heavily modified than that - like, we use a lot of paired strings on guitar, two strings that are tuned to the same note right next to each other. A lot of the tunings have three pairs: a low, a middle, and a high pair, and consequently they're strung differently than a normal tuning, also. Normally, a tuning is a matter of notes on a standard set of strings, whereas we end up buying lots of strings and customizing gauges. We do a lot of stuff like that. It's almost like half a 12-string, in a way. And song by song, the tunings change radically. Some are more dissonant, some are real unison-type things. We've got one tuning that's just two notes, back and forth, different octaves of the same two notes."

STEVE: "We have free sections within the songs. They're basically open interpretation until a certain cue is given, and then we jump back into the structure. A good example of that happens on 'Silver Rocket': It's verse/chorus/verse/chorus, and then it falls apart. I have an outline of what I do in the free section, but it varies according to my mood. I like throwing my cymbals around on top of the kit, or playing the heads and the rims."

STEVE: "On 'Hyperstation' I use one stick and one maraca on the floor tom. I smashed a bunch of maracas until I found the Latin Percussion one I've had for a while now - though it would be real dramatic when they'd break. And in the first two verses of 'Dirty Boots' I use one maraca and one stick on the snare."

STEVE: "I'm not real tech-minded. Until recently, I'd never had a new drum kit. I used the same one since I was 13: a chrome-colored Pearl wood/fiberglass set. I was sentimental, or maybe frugal. The band would give me shit about it, but I'd had it so long it just sounded like me. The two rack-toms were both 13 inchers, just tuned differently - anal drummers would say, 'Oh my God - you're not getting your full spectrum of sound!' But I just bought a new Brady kit, ruling drums made in Perth, Australia. The ride toms are 12' x 12' and 14' x 14', the kick 22' x 18'. The snare is a little deeper than normal. It has a really good middle, and it cuts without being too high. It's not all immediate crack - it has body. My hardware is Pearl, but I've got a really cool Drum Workshop bass drum pedal. I like the sound of the Paiste Signature Series cymbals, but they keep breaking - I'm going back to K. Zildjians, at least for live. And my sticks are wood-tipped 5Bs. I forget the brand - maybe I'd remember if they sent me free ones."

"The equipment they use is regular stuff: Fender Jaguars and Jazzmasters put through old Marshall 100-watt heads and two cabinets. Kim prefers the Fender Precision and a BC Rich for bass. Steve Shelley pounds whatever he can get his hands on. Nothing new here."

KIM: [re: becoming more conventional e.g. locking in with the kick drum] "Maybe, but those songs - like "Mote" and "Disappearer" - are my least favorites to play. I prefer the freer ones, like "Cinderella's Big Score". The only really difference is that you can hear the bass this time. We've always tried to make records that sound good, but I don't think they've actually been very good. Sister has a great sound, except the drums, which are like cardboard. On Daydream Nation, the vocals suck. And Goo doesn't have enough dynamics - that's what happens when you mix democratically."

KIM: "I try to find something that goes with what both Lee and Thurston are playing. They have very different styles, so I often come up with things that are less than specific. Actually, guitar was my first instrument, and I think of my instrument as a bass guitar. I like playing up high along with the other guitars - it's more like an orchestra or something. Bass is a very limited instrument, but I like that kind of creativity: working within limitations."

KIM: [re: becoming a better bass player despite underground roots] "I'm not a better bass player. I don't know any more about the bass than when I started. To me, a bass is a piece of wood with four strings - I just try to get as much resonance as possible."

This last comment (and likely many others!) did not please Mr. David W. Carr, who had a letter to the editor published in the Sept/Oct 1991 issue of Bass Player. His "Sonic Slam" is worth preserving: "Kim Gordon, the bass holder in the politically correct rock band Sonic Youth, seems proud of the fact that she knows nothing more about the bass now than she did ten years ago. In Joe Gore's interview, she says a bass is nothing but "a piece of wood with four strings on it" and states that she doesn't need to know anything about the formal language of rock bass because it was developed by men. This is nothing more than bohemian posturing and a feeble attempt to appear socially significant. It's also the wrong messsage to send to young players who should seek as much knowledge as possible about every facet of playing. I'm no techno-wiz myself, but even I know that ignorance is not bliss - it's just ignorance."

KIM: "I recorded Goo with an early '70s Fender Jazz Bass. Onstage, I play a cheesy B.C. Rich bass. It looks pretty cool, and I don't have to worry about destroying it. I play through a Cry Baby wah and a Turbo-Rat distortion - I use it on a slightly distorted setting for just about everything. I have a MESA/Boogie 400+ amp with a 4x12 guitar bottom and another cabinet with an 18."

THURSTON: "As we got into using different tunings for different songs, but didn't yet own a lot of guitars., we'd have to spend five minutes tuning up between each song. So I started playing a tape of "Not Right" by the Stooges, and it made people stick with the show. I started using other things, like Ratt's "Round and Round". When I played that, all the kids in back ran up front yelling "Ratt! Ratt!" We really got off on it too, because we like seeing our show as a continuous piece of music. On the Neil Young tour, we used Black Sabbath's "War Pigs", Gerardo's "Rico Suave", some Karen Carpenter, and Artikulation, a György Ligeti electronic piece from 1958."

THURSTON: "For "Scooter & Jinx", I 10'ed everything on my amp. There's no guitar, just amp sound, and at the end you can hear a pop where the amp blows up. We just ran it to tape, 24 tracks. And the long ending of "Mote" has to be one of the loudest takes anyone has ever made - just saturated, broiling guitar. I had a guitar in front of a Marshall stack, going through a bunch of boxes that boosted the sound. I'd just stand there, bending the neck. We could only leave the amp on for a few seconds at a time, because it was so preamp-overloaded that it would have just popped. It was brutal! I've never heard anything like it!"

GUITARS

LEE: "Jaguars and Jazzmasters are our favorites, because you can play on the length of string behind the bridge, they have a light, comfortable body shape, and the tremolos are pretty good - we hate string-lock tremolos of any sort. We've also used a lot of Telecasters and Tele Deluxes, and I've come to appreciate Gibsons lately. It's funny - the one guitar we've never had in the band is a Stratocaster."

KIM: "Onstage I play a cheesy B.C. Rich bass, but I recorded Goo with an early-'70s Fender Jazz Bass."

AMPS

THURSTON: "...vintage Marshall 100-watt amp"

KIM: "A MESA/Boogie 400+ amp with a 4x12 guitar bottom and another cabinet with an 18."

LEE: "A Fender 4x10 Super Reverb souped up by Harry Kolbe, with two stock speakers in the top, two heavy-duty Electro-Voice speakers below. I also have a stock Fender Concert. Both are pre-CBS blackfaces."

EFFECTS

THURSTON: "I have a Turbo-Rat, which I use as a preamp to my vintage Marshall 100-watt amp, and I also use a DOD fuzzbox. But basically effects are like legalese to me - I just don't want to know about them."

KIM: "I play through a Cry Baby wah and a Turbo-Rat. I use a slightly distorted setting for just about everything."

LEE: "I'm playing through five pedals: an MXR phase shifter, a Cry Baby, a DOD Digital Delay - not as good as my Fender delay, which broke - a Tube Works distortion pedal, and a BOSS CS-2 compressor."

The interview with Thurston is much longer than Lee's, and there's also a sidebar called "Thurstons' Favorites In Japan", highlighting the Boredoms and Keiji Haino. The playing analysis stuff is really cool to see, including parts of "Sugar Kane" "100%" "Dirty Boots" "Drunken Butterfly" "Wish Fulfillment" "Theresa's Sound-World" and "Purr"! Lee's awesome "Sugar Kane" solo is tabbed in both the correct tuning (well, almost...) and standard tuning for comparison. Unlike future Japanese features, it doesn't have any awesome gear pictures, but it's still a lot of quality content.

Because of the kinda jumbled translations I can get the gist of the interview, but not really provide confident quotes. Thurston talks about the guitars he used on Dirty, "Standard Kim Tuning" aka EGDGED, not remembering which guitars go with which tunings go with which songs are on the album, other classic tunings, changing gauges but not knowing which gauges he uses, all explained by having a roadie on tour for the past 2 years (Keith Nealy, I believe? I don't think Jim Vincent had come onboard yet...), other bands or guitarists he's a fan of (Butthole Surfers, Einstürzende Neubauten, Boredoms, UFO or Die, Cows, Tom Verlaine, Robert Quine, Sonny Sherrock, Lou Reed, and My Bloody Valentine), amps and effects, drumsticks and string behind the bridge, John Coltrane, playing with Lee Ranaldo, touring with Neil Young, working with Butch Vig, and Ian MacKaye's guest appearance on "Youth Against Fascism".

Lee talks about Thurston.

Just kidding - but it's a much shorter interview! He discusses tunings as well as players he likes such as Tom Verlaine, Leo Kottke, Django Reinhardt, Jerry Garcia, and d Boon. Some 20th century composers also get a credit - John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, Eric Satie, Harry Partch and Steve Reich. He also talks about his approach to soloing, in particular "Chapel Hill", but I can barely make sense of it... There's some amp and effects stuff that I can discern, which we'll get to below...

THURSTON

Thurston initially cites EGDGED (the "Standard Kim" tuning - unless "Standing Kim" really is a correct translation?) then mentions GGDDD#D# and F#F#F#F#EB as other favorites. Actually, he just calls it the "Brother James" tuning, but is specific about the "Death Valley" tuning (which is also how it's described).

In the "playing analysis" feature, each tuning is listed for the various songs tabbed out, with one minor error. There are arrows indicating whether to tune the string up or down.

THURSTON

THURSTON

LEE: "In our early days we were into playing off of the chaos element of unpredictable equipment. When we'd tour Europe using different amps every night, we knew if we turned them all the way up, we'd get some raggedy-ass sound that was wonderful in at least some aspect. But now, as our songs get more specific, we're more into having things under our control, though we'll never be hi-fi gearheads.

Our sound initially came out of being so supercharged by the notion of playing live that we just cranked the amps. With those fine old Fenders, you just turn them to "10," and you don't need much else. That, plus the Rat and Turbo-Rat pedals that Thurston, Kim, and I have all used, has generally been the source of our distortion.

Amps have become so high-tech, with various stages of gain, preamp, and master volume. Now distortion is more of a contrived science, created with a pedal or a special amp setting. But old amps, even the no-name ones from the '50s that I've been collecting lately just sound great when they're turned up all the way.

In the studio, Thurston and I tend to go with our tried-and-true favorite amps. He still uses a Marshall stack, though for the new record [Dirty] I switched from my old blackface Fender Super Reverb and Concert pair to a MESA/Boogie Mark III. Since I got it, I've tried to rely more on the channel switching than the Rat pedal. The amp plays like a dream, though I did augment it with other things, like the vintage Orange head I used for the real overdriven stuff. It's a little rattier-sounding than a Marshall, though not in a low-tech sense. The presence knob really gives you incredible control over the quality of the sound. For certain things, man, there's nothing that can touch that amp - it's God's gift to distortion."

On Sonic Youth:

THURSTON: "We didn't know anything about studios then - the fact that it was 24-track meant nothing to us. We did everything in two days. We tracked everything the first day, did a couple of vocal overdubs, and mixed it the next day."

On "Running Scared" (aka, uh, "The Burning Spear"):

THURSTON: "That was the first song we ever wrote. It was really weird, because I always thought that the first time we'd record, the first thing I'd want on the album would be a huge "E" chord. But it wasn't - it was a drum. I really worried about it. I'd think, "Wow, the first thing is this drum smash." Now I'm really glad we did it, because the drum is the original instrument.

We decided that since we had cheapo guitars that nobody else would play, we'd use them prepared in weird ways. This song is basically a drum stick stuck under the 12th fret that's chimed with another drum stick. And Kim and the drummer at the time, Richard Edson, played this kind of reggae beat, which was something we were very into. There was some really radical reggae music around that time that everyone was into. It was much more fresh then, so people were experimenting with it."

On "I Dreamed A Dream" (closer..):

THURSTON: "That's in standard tuning. Much of the first record is in standard tuning. It wasn't until after this record was completed that we really got into creating new tunings. "I Dreamed A Dream" came out of a picking thing we did. Richard Edson wrote the lyrics, which was very strange. Usually, I'll write the lyrics or Kim or whoever is singing, but never the drummer."

On Confusion Is Sex:

LEE: "It was during this album that we really started working with alternate tunings. That's partly because of the cheap guitars we were using - they really wouldn't do normal-tuning things, so we'd do other things with them. There was no hope of getting them to play "G" and "A" and "C"."

On Kill Yr Idols:

LEE: "We did this live to two track, in opposition to the crazy eight-track recording of Confusion is Sex. There weren't any overdubs, and we all had really cool parts. Those songs were mostly just two guitars in unison tuning. It was just three songs, but it was a good bridge."

They also discuss Bad Moon Rising, EVOL, and Sister "Into the Groovey" and "Teenage Riot" but nothing is particularly quoteable.

On "My Friend Goo":

THURSTON: "Kim wrote that because she was worried that we were writing too many four- and five-minute songs. She said, "Hey, we have to write some two-minute jobbers." She sat down with the guitar, wrote that song and showed it to us. I find it very difficult to play her songs because she has a very strange sense of rhythm. It sort of puts me off. Kim plays with this other girl named Julie. I've tried to play with them but they have this very weird, female-rhythm thing going. They play together very well, but I can't play with either of them.

I used to play the bass on that song, and a lot of the time I couldn't start it because I couldn't get the Kim rhythm thing going. It turned into kind of a joke."

Thurston goes on to comment about "Kool Thing" "100%" and "Sugar Kane", but again, nothing too revelatory.

THURSTON

The SY content is about 6 paragraphs including an interview with Lee discussing string gauges, the joy of open tunings, and some specifics from new release Dirty. There's also a separate page of instruction based on their tunings, including a riff inspired by GGDDD#D# and a rough stab at Thurston's "Teenage Riot" riff.

STEVE: [re: Lee's From Here To Infinity LP + tour] "He did an album that was pretty much taped pieces that he would manipulate. But we did some live shows that consisted of both of us playing tape players with different sounds that we had recorded - like drum beats, bells, reggae and orchestral music from other people's records, and disturbing sounds like jackhammers or loud distortion. There was also a drumset, and I would run over and play to the tapes. Lee also had some guitars that he had tuned in a certain way. We did about a half dozen of those shows."

STEVE: [re: Lucky Sperms 7"] "On the B-side we did the music to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" with the lyrics to their "Glass Onion". Mike [Watt] sang into a sampler and then played it back at an extra-slow speed, so it's barely intelligible."

STEVE: [re: Ciccone Youth] "That's a really odd record. [...] When we went into the studio, we didn't have anything written; we just went in and started playing with drum machines and samplers. [...] Everyone programmed the machines. We would put down a rhythm track, and the guitar or something else would follow along, which would become the basis of a song. Then we'd build by overdubbing on that."

STEVE: "When we signed with Geffen, I bought a new drumset - because I could afford one at that point. I bought this Brady kit, which has helped me out a lot. I also started using coated Ambassadors instead of Pinstripes. The Brady drums are sort of oversized; the bass is a pretty standard 22", but the first tom is a 12x12 and the next is 14x14, and the floor tom is 16x16. It's a little difficult to tune the bottom head with the top, but I like the way they feel."

STEVE: "I use average crash sizes live, like 16" through 20", though I experiment with different sizes, mainly when it comes time to record. I actually used smaller cymbals because I wanted to cut through, but I didn't want the cymbals to ring for too long and then have to be mixed down. I wanted the attack and the brightness, so I went down in size."

STEVE: "John Aldridge, who puts out The Not So Modern Drummer newsletter, loaned me a couple of Black Beauties when we recorded this record, so I used them when it was appropriate on a couple of songs, including "Shoot". I love James Brown, rhythm and blues, and a lot of straight blues - which you might not expect if you listen to our albums. The whole album has a little more of that groove, which is fun for me."

STEVE: "There are actually a couple of songs on Dirty where there's no bass; Kim plays this East German guitar that she tunes half of really low and the other half sort of normal."

THURSTON: "This time we got to use a 24-track studio - Magic Shop NYC. It has an old broadcast Neve desk - early 70s model. It was a beautiful wooden thing and it was way more hot than anything else we've used. But then, we do something different on every record so I doubt we'd go to the same place next time. For Dirty we also had a producer and that was a first for us. It's not as if we've been anto the idea in the past, it's just that we never knew anyone. To find someone who would do more than engineer, someone who could organize the day-to-day events, make sure we were playing to the best of our abilities and be in tune with our music took ten years. Butch [Vig] has been producing punk bands in his little studio in Wisconsin for years. When we finally did meet it was really interesting."

"However, it was Andy Wallace, the mix engineer who had a lot to do with the sonic quality of Dirty. He'd done this Slayer album that sounded great so we wanted to work with him. But then he wasn't consistent - some of the mixes sound very different and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not."

THURSTON: "I don't think that specific amplifiers and guitars are all that important - our sound's kinda there already. We don't work technically, songs and sounds develop organically in the rehearsal/studio environment. Frankly, I think it's the recording process and the studio environment that makes the real difference. However, we do know what gear works best for us now."

"I used an old Peavey Roadmaster head for most of my parts which I had plugged into a Marshall quad box. I'm still using the Fender Jazz Master I've had for years. Lee, our other guitarist uses effects but he changes them so often I lose track."

DAVE: "Do you play in odd tunings so that you can reach the chords and sounds in your head or are such techniques done intentionally to throw yourself out of the familiar and into the random?"

THURSTON: "That's a stupid-ass question."

LEE: "Everything sounded so great just listening back through the desk without any effects or EQ on it, flat, that we thought, "Why try to better that, introducing mixing and EQ and all that shit? We always used to listen to our stuff back through the desk like that so why don't we do an album that's this simple?" We didn't do many overdubs - I think there are about four in total - and the mistakes are all still in there, so we did some rough mixes: half hour, just banged 'em out so we could listen at home. And when it came to mixing we spent two weeks in a big old, expensive studio where we mixed Dirty and tried to get some real proper mixes done, and at the end of each day after working for 12 hours on each song we said we still liked the half-hour one we did at the other place. Perverse! We ended up doing all the songs but on the record there are a lot of rough mixes because they sounded better."

LEE: "I think Thurston and I are equally prone to guitar overkill. I think I actually have more guitars than him now but on this record we used a lot less, that's for sure. Between us it was about ten in total instead of the 20 or 30 we normally do. There are a lot less tunings on this album, too. Rather than try and spend time switching guitars we kept the one we had and carried on. It made it a lot more fun that's for sure; it can get boring constantly switching guitars for the sake of it."

THURSTON: "Winner's Blues is an acoustic piece that we recorded at the end of the sessions for the album, taking a guitar and trying to write a song in an hour, in the studio, and then eventually using it as a b-side for a single or to insert it in some compilation, since we are often asked to take part in similar operations. We recorded it and it was fine as it was, so much so that the version you hear on the album is just that "first take"; inserted into the album because it seemed to us to immediately illustrate the mood of the record, which was representative of the content of it."

THURSTON: "The film's music was scored by myself, Mike Mills, Greg Dulli, Don Fleming and Dave Grohl. For the recordings I used a six-string Rickenbacker and a Matchless combo. I connected the guitar in the studio, didn't touch anything and played a chord - the sound was there. A setting for the whole record in less than a second! This was a really easy session that we completed in two days. Dave Grohl showed me how to play the songs." (In response to this, the interviewer asks if Dave Grohl can play guitar!)

THURSTON: (re: SY gear) "I like old Fender Jazzmasters which I modify by removing the toggle switch and replacing the original bridge with a Gibson bridge. I also mount a metal saddle. That's how I totally devalue the Jazzmasters, but I'm into that because I hate guitar collectors! They only care about increasing value - and it's still just a fucking instrument! I used to be able to buy Jazzmasters so cheaply, now I can't. For effects I use a Sovtek Big Muff, a Turbo Rat and a Fuzz from an old American company called (thinks for a long time)... With such a funky name.... [interviewer suggests Electro-Harmonix] No, the name is much funkier. No idea. For a long time I have had a Peavey tube head with 100 watts..."

He might be thinking of the Mu Tron Wah-Vol? I'm not sure what else he might have been using at that time...

THURSTON: "In the beginning we had really cheap instruments that sounded like crap when you played them normally. I didn't know how to play normally anyway. So we experimented with tuning because it just sounded better. That was totally radical!"

THURSTON: "I go purely by ear and look for things that I like. I'm currently playing a tuning by Steve, he's the guitarist for Pavement. This is my favorite tuning. On the new record we mostly used the following tuning: two low Gs, two D# and two Ds."

He is referring to the CGDGBB tuning (a modification of Stephen Malkmus's CGDGBE tuning) and GGDDD#D# (which was close!).

Lee's .73mm nylon pick also makes the "pick poster" centerfold in this issue.

THURSTON

LEE: "Having pickups on both sides of the bridge gives you a lot of interesting options. Normally, when you play behind the bridge, you're vibrating the main part of the string indirectly, so it gets this weird resonance as the vibration goes across the bridge to where the pickup is. But with a pickup behind the bridge, you can play back there and have the sound be very direct. Conversely, you can play conventionally in front of the bridge but have only the behind-the-bridge pickup on, so you have long stretches of string doing that resonant thing."

LEE: [re: how much of SY's music is improvised] " People always imagine that we arrive in the studio or on stage, that we plug in the amps and that we improvise while grinding our strings and guitars (laughter). That's not true. Simply, before recording, the structure of the pieces is very precise. We know that we start from a well defined point A and that we must get to a Z Point also well defined. It only prevents it remains the fair when you record, that at any time there is one that stops to put a disk and so on. But between A and Z, there can be good slices of freedom, improvisation. And in more than a decade, it hasn't really changed. Improvisations may evolve depending on what you listen to a moment gives. For example, right now I'm in my music phase from Indonesia and India. Then with Thurston, he is always tres Cage and Xenakis branches. Which doesn't stop us from listening to pop. Once, in concert, we sometimes had fun passing tapes between our tracks. A little Janet Jackson, Madonna, Pat Benatar... " [forgive the robot translation imperfections!]

LEE: "Always. We wanted to have fun and make a record with Thurston and me on the piano and Kim and Steve on the bass and the drums (laughs). But Kim didn't agree too much."

BECK: "But you've already done things on the piano, haven't you?"

LEE: "There's some on Secret Girls on "EVOL", on Providence on "Daydream Nation" and on the cover of The Carpenters."

LEE (re: "No Queen Blues"): "It's a Les Paul with an additional pickup between the first two. It's played with a lot of the treble rolled off, so it's really warm and round and not too biting. The first minute or two of that song - where all the scratchy stuff is happening - that's an 8-track demo. And then right as it kicks into the song proper, it's cross-faded to the 16-track mix. At the beginning it's pretty ratty and lo-fi, but as the first vocal hits, just about all the instrumentation except my guitar becomes 16-track. For the first verse, we kept my 8-track lead lines. When the second verse hits, I'm back in the 16-track domain as well, so another tonal shift happens. I'm really proud of the way we managed to seam that one together."

LEE (re: "Washing Machine"): "I play the Travis Bean with that tuning we talked about earlier, and then in the section where it drops down briefly to just bass and drums, I swap over to a Les Paul in a G tuning for the second half of the song. That gives it this really cool tonal shift, because in the first part Thurston and I are playing in these F# tunings. So Thurston shifts keys to G, but I actually shift guitars. I do it every night onstage."

LEE: "We have two of the creepiest pedals on this record that you could ever imagine or desire. One is an old Maestro ring modulator that I use a lot these days when I play solo. I used it on the record on a bunch of different places, and I really love it. It's got that real outer-spacey kind of sound. The other device, which I use for the middle break of "Junkie's Promise" and Thurston uses at the head of "Diamond Sea" for another kind of a wah-wah sound, is a really bizarre pedal called something like the Ludwig Phase II guitar synthesizer. It comes in a little metal suitcase, and you unfold one side that becomes a wah-wah kind of footpedal with a bunch of switches on it. Then you lift back a plate on the top, and there are all kinds of modifying sliders for envelope and stuff like that. It's really a sick thing. I've never seen anything like it before, and it's capable of all kinds of insane, crazy phasing and wah and synthetic kinds of sounds. It's gorgeous. Thurston plays it onstage, and we're looking for another one so we can each have one."

LEE: "I really love this amp that I used on the last two records. It's a Fender Custom Shop model called the Tone Master. That's pretty much my amp of choice these days. It's almost too loud at 100 watts, and I was talking to them about putting in a switch to step it down to 50 watts. I use Fender Custom Shop cabinets - a 4x12 and a 2x12 with little legs on the side so you can lean it back. I also use a Fender reverb unit that's a copy of the original late '50s unit, since the Tone Master doesn't have a reverb unit inside of it. That's pretty much my setup at the moment."

LEE: "Thurston generally brings in more riff-oriented stuff, I bring in more chord changes, and Kim brings in weird note patterns. But since almost everything this time came out of tumbling jams, it's harder to discern who came up with what. We don't do lyrics until the music's all written, so nobody comes in with a riff and two verses. It's dealt with at first on a purely musical level."

THURSTON

This a fairly academic piece, and while interesting to read, there is not a single piece of gear or tuning mentioned in this nearly 10-page Guitar World feature!

LEE: "Well, we took a year off from the band, and during that time Kim played a lot of guitar with her band, Free Kitten. She came up with some tunings she was really fond of, and found a guitar she fell in love with, a Les Paul Special. I think for awhile now she's been wishing that maybe the bass wasn't always in standard tuning, or that she had somewhere else to go instrumentally besides that bass guitar thing. So when we started rehearsing she said, "I think I'll play guitar," and she started doing it more and more."

There are two full pages of Sonic Youth tunings, which is pretty awesome, but there are numerous errors that make it apparent these are all lifted directly from Joe Gore's excellent Guitar Player articles from '89, '91, '92 and '94.

No player is specified for any of these tunings, just Guitar 1 and Guitar 2.

I've now come to discover that these pages were taken from a Japanese book called something like "The Guitar 8". It may be #8 in a series, I'm not sure. I'm apparently missing the first page, which is just a live picture and some text (I guess there was something more important on the other side to be sold in a separate auction). The text I've translated seems to begin mid-description of the white Jazzmaster, so I don't think much of importance is missing. Each guitar pictured is studied and given some background and tech specs. I assume the photos were taken at one of the band's January 1996 Japan gigs, considering the presence of the "Junkie's Promise" guitar among other clues.

LEE: [re: level of improvisation on A Thousand Leaves] "All our songs have a degree of improvisation. But one obeys a very precise structure, one does not barge into something that one has not tried before. That's why they're real songs. But in each of them there is a space that musicians can occupy if they have the right idea at the right time. We refer to a very specific skeleton. This is what keeps the song on the ground, which allows it not to fly away and never come back."

LEE: [re: how vocal roles are divided] "When it's an impossible song to sing, I usually stick with it. Each writes his own words. We customize. As for the choice of songs, it is determined quite naturally. Sometimes it seems very obvious to all of us."

However, the interview opens with Thurston reading an issue of the magazine (which translates to "Guitars & Keyboards")...

THURSTON: "Our debut, we had a keyboard with us, Ann Demarinis. But she quickly left. She thought we weren't going anywhere..."

LEE: "It's me who plays the keyboard parts on the latest album. "

THURSTON: "Glenn was more formal than we were about how to use the tunings. His way of using them was done in a perfectly conscious way. We knew perfectly well that people had been using weird tunings for years. People like Joni Mitchell, Keith Richards. Neil Young or old blues players on the slide. To my knowledge, Glenn was the first to use it in such a formal way, to formalize the whole thing in order to include it in a way of his own."

LEE: "A Thousand Leaves is the album where we used the least number of different tunings. Before, it is true that on stage, we changed guitar for each track, simply because we used a max of different tunings. The tones of this last album are much more similar to each other than on our previous albums.

The article itself is one page, most of which is a picture of Mr. Shelley himself, with no detailed graph in sight. However, even the briefest interview with Steve always reveals some interesting tidbits!

STEVE: "On the song called 'Karen Koltrane' I play this Moroccan clay drum that I picked up there last year. I used a lot of Chinese gongs and bells on some of the songs, things like that. I also have a fondness for small shakers and maracas and such. They can have an almost electronic sound to them sometimes when they're the right size."

LEE: "For example, we just did a studio project where we turned up all the amps and just filled the room with sound. The guitars were leaning up against the amps, but nobody was touching anything./ If you stood in the room, you'd hear this massive hum from all the different instruments. But if you walked across the room, the sound would actually change depending on where your body intersected the sound waves. This wasn't because you were hearing things differently from another spot in the room; this was because your physical body interrupted the sound waves and altered the beating patterns. The tonal change was real - but it was also very nebulous, and almost mystical."

THURSTON: "We amassed all these different tunings as we were developing our style of guitar playing and I used to feel like it was so cool that we were doing this. But all the tunings became really burdensome because it required us to have a different guitar for each tuning. Also, a lot of our songs depended on specific guitars. We'd write a song with a cheapo guitar tuned in a certain way, and the song wouldn't sound right unless it was played with that guitar. We discovered you couldn't use the same tuning on another guitar and expect it to sound the same. For right now, I've kind of settled on two tunings."

LEE (re: "Female Mechanic Now On Duty"): "That song has the only bit of music that wasn't recorded in our studio. Towards the end, there's a part where this other section comes jarring in. That stuff was recorded when we played this live TV show called Sessions at West 54th Street. We really loved the way the taping came out, so we just spliced part of our TV performance into the song. "Female Mechanic" has that episodic thing going on. Each one of the song's sections could be used to write a completely different song - if we were a normal band, that is!"

THURSTON

LEE: "Both Thurston and I gravitated to the Jaguar and the Jazzmaster, cause we liked the way they were shaped, and it seemed like they had all the different elements of a guitar construction that we liked to use. They had the space behind the bridge where you can play on the little strings, and they had the kind of tremolo bar which we favour quite a bit. I think those two guitars, the Jaguar and the Jazzmaster, are pretty much exclusively what we use. We use other guitars, but I think that those two are our favorites just because they have the right set-up.

I like that set-up of tremolo bar far better than all these high-tech sophisticated systems, or the kind that's on the Strat. The ones on the Jaguar and Jazzmaster are just really cool. Especially the only ones from the '60s, which are really well made, and then they're just great to play. The two guitars are really similar, the Jazzmaster has a little bit longer neck and a longer scale, so there's more room to freak out on, which is nice."

LEE: "I just like Fender Amps, whereas Thurston plays Peavey amps with Marshall cabinets. I'm using a Fender Custom Shop amp; in general Fenders has always been the best sounding amps to a large degree, as far as I'm concerned."

LEE: "Pretty much Jazzmasters and Jaguars. We’ve got racks of guitars in the studio, but I think all the material we’ve worked on for the last six or eight months is just Jaguars and Jazzmasters, and even then only a couple of specific ones for me and Thurston. Most of the ones we use are early-’60s. But we do have some of the reissues. We like their scale length. I think both of us have gotten super-comfortable with the body shape and the tremolo bar, and the fact you can play behind the bridge on the string and all that kind of stuff. I’ve been modifying mine for the last year or so.

My favorite guitar sound has been from the Fender Tele Deluxes, because they’ve got the big Fender humbucking pickup on ’em. I was augmenting that with a couple of Travis Bean aluminum-neck guitars. Oddly enough, they have very similar-sounding pickups, to my ears. So for the last few years when we’ve seen a good Tele or Travis, we’ve bought it. And whenever we’ve seen those pickups for sale we’ve brought them. We’ve collected a little stash of those pickups and I’ve started putting them in the Jazzmasters and Jaguars, so I’ve pretty much got the best of both worlds. We call it the Jazzblaster."

LEE: "Sometimes it’ll happen when you pick up a guitar that hasn’t been played in six months. You strum it, and there’s a grain of something and you spend 10 minutes tweaking the pegs until it’s something a little more realized, and there you have it. Or one of us will come in with some changes in a tuning. Like, Thurston will come in and he’s got a tuning going, I’ll hear it and figure out what the root notes are basically and grab something I have in it. We play a lot of stuff in G and F sharp, and E and C. We have some guitars that are in tandem already, where he’s playing guitar X, I immediately pick up guitar Y. They’re not in the same tunings, but they’re in two tunings that work well together."

LEE: "On the last bunch of tours, we’ve taken 25 to 30 guitars for the three of us. The reason for taking them all is because they’re all differently tuned. A couple of basses, Kim’s two or three guitars and then maybe 10 guitars for Thurston and 12 for me. And sometimes there’ll be a backup of a certain tuning if it’s one you rely on a lot, or if it’s a finicky tuning where you tend to break strings. Like “The Diamond Sea” tuning, which is a really crucial tuning and it’s used in a few different things. If that breaks in the middle of that insane middle section of “The Diamond Sea,” when you come back to the end you’re kind of lost."

Following a discussion of SYR and A Thousand Leaves, Kim refers to three covers that the band recently recorded: Nirvana's "Moist Vagina", Johnny Winters' "Silver Train", and Leonard Cohen's "Dress Rehearsal Rag". I think we're still waiting on that, too!

THURSTON

THURSTON: "I would never write a text like "Tom Violence" again - it just doesn't fit into this time. And as for "Confusion is Next" or "Burning Spear", the lyrics really make me laugh. That's probably it. It's an age thing but when I was 20 I didn't seem to care what my vocals sounded like. It made sense. But if we sounded the same now as we did then it would make me feel like Aerosmith."

THURSTON: "I tuned the upper strings so low that they sounded almost percussive and had a bass character. That was so crazy that it was fun again. It was as if we had to develop a new tool first - and that was incredibly creative."

There's also a summary of Thurston's gear at the end of the piece, though some sound like Lee's...

Lots of Thurston and Lee's effects are visible, including Thurston's Wah-Vol, Big Muff, Turbo Rat, Hendrix Octave Fuzz, Phase 90, and Blue Box. For Lee, you can see his Overdrive Electronics Valve Grinder, Ibanez AD80 delay, Ibanez Tube King, Maestro Ring Modulator, Mu-Tron Bi-Phase, and DOD 2-Second Sampling Delay.

There's a sidebar on tunings and another on the band's approach to taking leads. But wait! There's more! This was one of those guitar magazines that came with a CD, and it contains a "Sonic Youth style" track composed by Simon Young. Tablature for the piece is also helpfully provided, on a page titled "Sonic Youth Secrets" which follows the Lee interview. The track appears on the CD in full, and then again in a backing track so you can play along as you learn. Simon wisely used CGDGBB (incorrectly citing Lee as the one who used on much of A Thousand Leaves), combining elements of "Teenage Riot" "Bull in the Heather" "Sunday" and "French Tickler".

LEE: [re: gear theft] "In the end we found that was a really good thing, because it let us go off in different directions and it pushed us in ways that we wouldn't normally have been pushed. Although, obviously, at the time it was tons of gear and money lost."

LEE: [re: songwriting] "Maybe someone has an idea or a riff, but we really write the music as a collective. Someone doesn't come in with a finished piece and say "Here it is, let's learn the parts and have a song." You're making it up as you go. Sometimes it seems as though the three of us playing strings are almost in our own little worlds with what we're doing. Sometimes you're cueing off each other and others you're completely ignoring everyone so you're almost playing in a three-way tandem, but eventually they lock together and fit into certain structures. Even within that, there are places in the structure where it's totally open; we start here and end up here, and how you get there is how ever it happens."

LEE: [re: recording] "We're all in one room, there are no baffles or anything, everything's sort of bleeding together, we really don't worry about that stuff. Because we recorded from the first fledgling beginnings of the track, you get that version which is the first time the song really came together. They weren't the most perfect or most polished or even the most finished, but they had a certain kind of energy. It's not like 50 times later when you feel like they've beaten it to death. There are still some bum notes, but there's a spark that's happening where the song is actually coming into being."

LEE: "The songs don't really find their peak or their final form until we've played them live for a few months. Sometimes they get more ferocious or whatever, because in that live context you find out more specifically what works and what doesn't. Records are more like postcards that are sliced out of a time line."

LEE: "It takes a very good improviser for a concert not to have dull moments. Mostly when you're listening to improvised music, there are inspired moments and then there are the moments when the group is moving from one inspiration to the next. In between, there's a lot of searching and feeling the way."

LEE: [re: ATP festival] "That wasn't an improvised gig at all. I mean, the first piece was a 20 minute long thing that we'd worked out for 12-string guitars. We loved it, we had a blast at that gig."

LEE: [re: the role of lead guitar] "It changes from song to song, there's not a lead guitar player. It used to be that when Kim was mainly playing bass [..] we'd go in and out of that kind of thing, in a way very similar to the interaction that Verlaine and Lloyd had in Television. One moment I'm playing lead and he's doing rhythmic stuff, and the next it's reversed. Some moments we're both playing lead and there is no rhythm, or some moments we're both playing different rhythms, interactively the way Garcia and Weir would do in the Grateful Dead. Now that Kim's involved too, it's even more like that, it's like this really snakey thing, 'cos we're all playing certain parts and they lock in certain ways rhythmically. We work more with rhythm and texture than we do with rhythm and lead."

LEE: [re: creating tunings] "The simplest thing is to take your mind out of standard tuning and normal finger positions and start twisting the pegs until something nice happens when you strum across the strings. The way it works for us is that once we've found a tuning we like we have to learn a whole series of finger positions. In the end, although we know what tuning we're in - in that we know what the notes are - we don't ever really talk in terms of chords at all, never "Well I'm playing a G chord now". We just know what the finger positions are and the way it sounds. So it's totally developed by ear."

LEE: "The last couple of albums have tended to have fewer tunings overall. Partly because it's fun to explore a tuning over a bunch of songs, but also because of certain touring practicalities. The more tunings you have the more guitars you have to take. I guess we've found that, although we love to take 20 or 30 guitars on the road, and do all the time, occasionally it becomes a problem just to go out and do simple little gigs."

LEE: [re: gear theft] "As much of a drag as it was to have it stolen, in retrospect we all thought that in a certain way it was also a good thing. It forced us all to go out and try different pedals and different guitars. We had some great vintage effects pedals that have been so hard to find that we haven't replaced them. We had amps where we were really happy with the sound. But we really missed the guitars, just because we had a lot of them that had been modified. Some of them were so specific to the songs that were written on them that now the guitar's gone, it's almost like the song can't be done anymore."

JIM: "I played bass on two-thirds of the songs and guitar on almost all of them. Actually, Lee was laughing in rehearsal, because I'm often playing bass live, which means he sometimes has to play my guitar parts. It was the first time he has ever had to play parts that weren't his own."

LEE: "We have an old 16-track, 2" Studer machine and a Pro Tools rig that are pretty much integrated. We recorded about half the stuff analog and the other half digital, and we mixed down to an old Ampex half-inch machine. Pro Tools is an amazing editing tool, but we still do plenty of editing where we're physically cutting tape, which I love to do because you arrive at things differently that way. Plus, the analog domain is where our final masters end up, and if you're mixing a song to tape like we do - in sections using a vintage Neve console - it's sometimes actually more expedient to use a razor blade than it is to use Pro Tools."

THURSTON

LEE: "Both Thurston and I almost always use Fender Jazzmaster, even though my guitar has pickups taken from a Tele DeLuxe (aka Jazzblaster). Then also a couple of Travis Beans and a 12-string Fender. Plus an old Fender Bassman 4x12" head."

LEE: "Three years ago a truck containing all of our equipment was destroyed in Orange County, California and found completely empty a few days later. Some of our instruments were unique, such as a completely modified Jazzmaster, various Telecasters, some Fender vintage basses - a total of 25 instruments. Without adding amplifiers, effects and pedals, specially made for us and designed for our sound needs. Stealing them was a bit like losing the carpet under our feet but, as often happens, not all evil came to harm, because it forced us to find new stimuli, to aim in different directions, to adopt a different approach. The theft happened just before we went into the studio to record NYC Ghosts & Flowers and obviously influenced the music on the album."

THURSTON: "We were playing in Portland, and there was a military stretcher in the dressing room. I got on it and [new member] Jim [O'Rourke] and [guitarist] Lee [Ranaldo] carried me onstage. As I jumped off and went to strap on my guitar, Jim picked up the stretcher - which was 20 feet tall - to move it. Then it fell out of his hands and right on top of my head, and knocked me out cold."

I was at this show - Portland, OR, August 30th 2002 - and his recollection is mostly accurate!

If the photos weren't enough, a table of the 27 songs on the band's master list for that tour is included, with a column for each of the four guitarists and which tuning they use on each song. Additionally, each tuning has a letter next to it that corresponds to the letter you see in the individual guitar pics, linking the instrument to the song/tuning. I should have thought of that!! Oh...

New tunes "Mariah" and "1234" are curiously missing from the magazine's list, however...

Seriously, this was well worth tracking down and I will add more details from this feature in the future - for now, enjoy the pictures and the new info!

THURSTON

THURSTON: "[New Hampshire]'s about the blues - and Aerosmith."

LEE: "You know, the Steve and Joe of the lyrics."

THURSTON: "We went to this taping of a blues convention of sorts, for that series Martin Scorsese was filming on the blues. Also, I grew up in New England in the early '80s and I've read Walk This Way about how Joe Perry and Steven Tyler grew up in New Hampshire in the late '60s - being immersed with the Yardbirds and rock-R'n'B, and how they saw Led Zeppelin in Boston and it changed their whole lives. So I threw in some thoughts about all that, as well as what the blues is now for someone growing up the city. I referenced that Scorsese event, but the main reason why I was there was to see Johnny Winter. He was my favourite guitar player - Still Alive And Well is my favourite guitar album of all time - and I'd never seen him play. And he was a no show!"

LEE: "I was more interested in Pavement when they started kicking out because they were actually using variant tunings. Steve Malkmus is the one guy who certainly took inspiration from us, but he's made it his own thing. Keith Richards plays in open tunings and we're not beholden to him, and I don't think Malkmus should be beholden to us; there's just a kinship there."

THURSTON: "It was kind of late in the game when I realised how strange we seemed to everybody. We'd go into these clubs with 12 guitars each with no cases, and we'd put them in drum cases onstage. And there was a part of me that did want to be part of the league of purity - just one guitar and play in normal tuning."

LEE: "That was never going to happen!"

Lesson #1: Use a drumstick or a screwdriver.

Lesson #2: Improvise.

Lesson #3: Use weird tunings.

THURSTON: [re: Sonic Nurse recording process] "The big difference was that we decided we would mix the record differently. We went to a really professional mixing studio as opposed to using our own studio. That was interesting because this time every time we pressed a button it would work! Jim O'Rourke was mixing the record and he was extremely sick, to the point where his head was passed out on the mixing desk and he was hallucinating while he was turning the knobs! Whatever sound the record has was due to his deep, deep sickness!"

THURSTON: [re: Jim O'Rourke's experimental approach] "Yeah, he does a lot of "prepared guitar" techniques. I have no idea what he's doing. Sometimes I look over there and he has a 24-foot long tape measure and he's wrapping it around the strings. I don't know what the hell he's doing but it sounds great. I use files to get certain sounds. I place long files on top of the strings over the pickups to create sound that way. I like that sound a lot. And I still tend to bow strings with wood, like a drumstick."

THURSTON: "I used three Jazzmasters on this album. There's one I really like, the black '68 Jazzmaster. I played that quite a bit. But I also play it when I do solo gigs or play with different noise improvisers and I tend to destroy it, kill the frets. I need some back-ups. I gotta find a guitar I really like that I don't use all the time. But then once I really like it, I'll want to use it for Sonic Youth. It's a Catch 22."

"The reason we started using them was because we used to use really cheap no-name guitars early on. Then when we started to be able to afford some better guitars, Jazzmasters were the ones we could afford. At the time (early to mid-eighties) the Jazzmaster was not a very important guitar; they were just giving them away. The Les Paul was the choice for rock and roll musicians. Nobody was playing Jazzmasters at the time, then we started doing it, J Mascis, My Bloody Valentine. All of a sudden it was more collectable. And now, forget it, you can't find them anywhere."

LEE: (RE: Sonic Nurse recording techniques) "We mostly close mic the amps but there were a few songs that I tracked where I had the same signal going into two or three different amps at the same time. We would mic them up and later choose whether to go with the cleaner one or the dirtier one or whatever. I think I probably did a bit more of that than the rest of the guys did. I spent a lot of time especially in doing overdubs, in trying out amps besides the ones I did the basic tracks with. Because most of the tracks started from full-on live playing, where all five of us were in a room tracking the song and without headphones, overdubs later usually amounted to some fixes or to some doubling of parts and occasionally a second part."

LEE: "...on this tour we did a couple of years ago, we ran into a guy who was custom building guitars. He had built one that he thought one of us would be interested in. It was a Jazzmaster-shaped 12-string with all kinds of on-board electronic features. Like all of the pick-ups are selectable whether they be single coil or humbucker and there's a Leslie controller built in that gives it that spiralling Leslie effect."

"GEAR TALK" LEE SPIEL:

SONIC GUITARS
The two main guitars I used on Sonic Nurse were a Fender Jazzmaster reissue which I got in '99 and a custom-made F-hole Jazzmaster copy called a Jazzblaster made by this guy Saul Koll in Portland, Oregon. He's made me a couple Jazzmaster copies.

Both Thurston and I favour the Jazzmaster body shape and though Thurston plays them pretty much stock, I take them and put Fender humbucking pick-ups in them - the kind you find on a Fender Tele Deluxe. I collect those pick-ups and put them in all my Jazzmasters and custom-built Jazzmasters and we do a lot of modifications to the electronics too. Like we take out all the wiring inside and all those weird switches and stuff and just put in a regular three-position toggle switch in and take out the tone controls.

I have a ridiculous amount of guitars in my collection. I've got like a Fender Subsonic that was made a few years ago. Those guitars are usually made pre-tuned a few steps down and are similar to a Baritone guitar. There's a '66 Fender 12-string guitar and many Fender Tele Deluxes. They used to be among my favourite guitars, as I collected a whole batch of them at one point but Jim (O'Rourke) has taken over playing them now.

When we go out on the road we usually take with all the guitars and basses, close to 30 instruments. I have a rack of about 10 guitars, while Thurston has about seven, Jim's got about three and Kim's got three. But in our studio we have another 50 or 60 kicking around.

SONIC AMPS
I'm basically back to playing out of a '65 or '66 Fender Super Reverb, sometimes augmenting it with an old 60s Fender Bassman head. Thurston plays out of a Peavey Roadmaster through a Marshall bottom while Kim plays a Peavey Rockmaster through a pair of Fender 2x12 cabs. In the studio with this record, we experimented a lot with using smaller amps to record. This time around we wrote and recorded most of this material on small amps, not our stage set-up. Usually we write and record with our stage set-up and as you can imagine it occasionally makes for very loud studio practices!

And we were using a lot of little amps of various vintages, like from an old '57 Fender Tweed Deluxe with a single 12in speaker built in to a recent reissue Fender Prosonic, to an old amp called a Moby Dick which was made by a company in Sicily. They are custom-made and hand-wired point-to-point class A amps that some guy sent over to us.

SONIC EFFECTS
We've all got a wide arsenal of pedal effects these days from modern ones to vintage ones. I'm using a Moogerfooger Ring Modulator, an Electro-Harmonix Micro Synth (especially for those sounds on the beginning and ending of New Hampshire, which is more prominent when we play it live), a MXR Blue Box, Ibanez AD80 Analog Delay, Hughes & Kettner Tube Factor, Klon Centaur distortion pedal and a DOD 2-second Sampling Delay.

LEE: "On the first record we ever did there were some standard tuning stuff but after that, it's been all alternate tunings of our own device. We haven't gleaned any of them from books or any of those kinds of standard open tunings we've just made them all up. They also usually necessitate a lot of restringing of specific gauge strings."

"I don't have any guitars that take a standard string set because there are often paired strings - two strings tuned to the same note and another two tuned to the same note and so on - so we have to string them up specifically for the different tunings."

LEE: (re: approach to constructing tunings) "I usually just find them on the guitar neck, seek them out and make them up. In many cases we're playing versions of traditional chords like G and D or chords that are more extended like 9ths or 13ths, but we don't ever talk about chords in terms of letter names or in the standard way when we're writing music. It's all done by ear in the terms of the way we interact with each other. We tune the guitars and then spend time working out complimentary tunings if we're playing in different tunings on a particular song. We have some tunings where Thurston and I are usually in different tunings but the tunings are made up of a lot of the same notes."

LEE: "I think I've learned how to manipulate and coax an array of sounds out of the instrument. The thing you hope you've learned is how to make the guitar respond to your bidding. And I think I've been able to do that - to think something in my head and figure out how to get that sound out of a guitar. And usually this is dealing with unconventional, well... it's not like we're trying to produce your typical chords and lead runs. We'll be striving for something a little bit different and that ability to actualise these things on a guitar has developed over time."

LEE: [working out parts between him and Thurston] "Well it usually starts with some really rudimentary aspects of a song like a couple of bars or a chord change. Then we'll have a tuning. Maybe Thurston will be playing something in a certain tuning. I'll maybe try three or four different guitars that are laying around the studio in different tunings and if one of them works I'll go with that. If none of them work I'll choose one that is close to his tuning and then start twisting the fret pegs while he's playing, just strum the open chords until something nice and resonant happens. Then we start working out chords and fret patterns from there. Occasionally we will both be playing the exact same tuning but more frequently it's tunings that match each other but are not the same."

LEE: "We use a variety [of guitars] but Thurston and I prefer Fender Jazzmasters. There is something about the way they are constructed that's really conducive to what we do. It's partly because they are so long compared to other guitars. We also really like the Jazzmaster whammy bar. It's pretty much our favourite tremolo bar on any guitar. We don't like the sophisticated, high tech tremolo arms - the Jazzmaster's, in contrast, is really basic and doesn't throw the guitar out of tune."

LEE: "Jazzmasters are very solidly constructed - especially the older ones. They're rugged and seem to hold up to the sort of abuse that we deal out to them. Usually we change all the electronics. We take out a lot of the Fender wiring because those guitars came with a lot of different, fussy switches. We usuaully rip all that out along with the tone controls, just keep the volume knob and put a regular three-way toggle switch in. I go a step further with my Jazzmaster and change the pickup sound on them. I don't really like the sound so I usually put the Fender humbucker pickups that come out of the Telecaster Deluxes."

LEE: [re: how long they've used Jazzmaster] "I would say since the turn of the 90s. In the 80s we were using a lot of Telecaster Deluxes and Les Pauls now and again. But towards the end of that decade we toured a lot with Dinosaur Jr and J Mascis really favoured Jazzmaster guitars. I think it was he who originally turned us onto them."

LEE: "There's a few recently which have been quite popular on the last couple of records. From the low string to the high string - G G D G G A. Another one I've used a lot recently is C G D C G D. Another one we call the Death Valley tuning because the first song we wrote on it was "Death Valley '69" - that one is 2 low F sharps, 2 middle F sharpes and then an E and a B on top. That is a beautiful tuning for doing stuff."

KIM: "I'm a very minimal bass player. I guess that's because I like giving up room for other people to make sounds around me. But these days I'm just really into the bass being dark sounding, and on this record I went back to my old 1976 Gibson Thunderbird for that. It has that really low, deep bass sound. Maybe Jim O'Rourke did something to it when he mixed the record, but otherwise I don't think most people have that kind of bass sound, except maybe on a rap record."

KIM (re: playing more guitar): "I liked playing guitar with Free Kitten, so I switched. When we first started Sonic Youth, we used to switch around instruments a lot. The attitude was that we really didn't know what was going to happen, so we didn't need it to be so formal."

KIM (re: "Stones"): "On most of the songs, what I'm playing is pretty straighforward and follows the root note of the guitar, except in "Stones," where the bass goes off and plays shapes around what the other guitars are doing. I just tried to add more color to it, especially when the guitars go into the high part and it builds back into the song. I love the song because it has this sort of Crazy Horse vibe to it."

ERIC BAECHT: "Kim isn't much of a gearhead, and that's all right because she's very specific and savvy about her bass and guitar tones."

KIM: "The Thunderbird's insane to play for too long, because it's so heavy. I've been using the EB-0 because it's just easier and smaller. It only sounds good with new strings, though [usually D'Addario mediums]. I'd like to have another bass that has more resonance to it, but for now this one is really fun to play live."

LEE: "...because certain songs definitely have a verse part and a chorus part, although we aren't always aware of that at the time. We generally don't deal with lyrics when we write. We write instrumentally, then record instrumentally, and then the lyrics are added - unless Thurston has an idea for a vocal right away."

THURSTON (re: "Pattern Recognition"): "That song is interesting, because when I came up with it at home, I had vocals and everything. Then we started jamming on it, and everybody liked the tune, but they didn't really like what I was doing vocally. So Kim completely rewrote the vocal, and it turned it into a whole different song."

LEE (re: "Pattern Recognition"): "I'm doing the single-note lead in the beginning. Thurston plays the harmonics, and Kim is playing the noisy slide part. Jim played bass on that song. The power chords and the question-and-answer sections in the middle are played by Thurston and me. I played one of my Jazzblasters, which is basically a Jazzmaster hot-rodded with Fender humbuckers. I plugged into a Hughes & Kettner Tube Factor distortion into a 1957 Fender tweed Deluxe and a Bassman with a Fender Custom Shop 2x12 cab."

LEE: "We try not to go crazy with overdubs. We'll double some parts, and we'll layer things to get a certain effect. On the intro to "Dripping Dream," for instance, Jim played through a bunch of pedals to get that crazy fuzz sound. Then he layered that a few times. On the other hand, my basic guitar track on a couple of tunes was so nice that we just did some little fixes in Pro Tools. I didn't do any more actual playing at all."

You can read the specifics of their gear - as best as Google Translate would provide - in the August 2024 Japanese gear mag feature.

THURSTON

LEE: [re: practice] "No, I actually don't have the kind of discipline of some virtuosos. It is with the group that we got into the habit of working and rehearsing as much as possible. As we play in open-tuning, we must perpetually recreate the chords. You can't just find a C or a G automatically, without thinking about it. Not only must positions be found, but new agreements must also be sought. At last night's concert (La Maison de la Radio), I still had the feeling that we were learning to play the new songs. I think our game will be much smoother and more relaxed on the tour."

"For those who still doubt that Lee Ranaldo is seriously ill, a quick visit to his official website (www.leeranaldo.net) will convince them. In particular, there is a complete inventory of all the guitars that have been stolen from him over the years and there are, hold on to it, no less than 99. And not all crap. He has even just recovered one, the only one so far, a Travis Bean Artist which had been stolen from him in July 99. majority of Fender (7 Jaguar, 22 Jazzmaster and 4 Mustang...) or Gibson (9 Les Paul, but also 1 Firebird and 1 Marauder...), which rub shoulders with brands known only to specialists in vintage or rarities ( Gershon, Kent, Sugar Kane, Univox, etc.)."

I used to have the Framus Jaguar listed as "Unknown Sugar Kane GTR" which I guess they mistook for a brand, ha! Anyway, I'm always delighted to see this site get mentioned in a gear magazine, and the article actually ends as follows:

"For lack of space, we cannot give here an exhaustive list of all the guitars used by Lee since 1981. Especially since he regularly adds more to his list. For that, it is better to consult his site. Here are just two or three models, with their tunings, just to tempt you."

I included this sidebar below, which nicely summarizes some info on his usage of Jazzmasters, Tele Deluxes, and Travis Beans.

LEE: "...we love guitars and it's nice to enjoy it so much with us. It's like a bunch of friends. We have Les Pauls, Fender Jazzmasters, Japanese guitars with two bullets... We don't travel without our own guitar shop. It's quite unique. Some groups carry around twenty guitars, but they are generally the same models. From the beginning, we started to accumulate guitars and, towards the end of the 80s, we already carried a good twenty with us everywhere we went. [...] Some sound so special that they fit perfectly into specific titles. If we lose the guitar, we lose the song with it."

A sidebar entitled "La Materiel de Lee Ranaldo" lists the tunings used for 3 different guitars, from this website (kinda):

KIM: "I guess I am, for the most part. There's one song on the album called "Rats" where Thurston plays bass and I play guitar. It was fun relinquishing the bass to Jim. I have severe tendonitis and I never practice. Actually, on this tour, Mark Ibold is going to play bass on some of the songs I sing on."

KIM: "I was a guitarist playing mostly basslines, so it made more sense to play bass. I like the limitations of something that has so few strings. It's a challenge. It's sort of mysterious and you can subtly shift things. We were really into PiL and Jah Wobble. Tim Wright of DNA always had a great sound, and I loved the bottom end on Slayer records."

KIM: "Thurston pretty much wrote all the [Rather Ripped] songs while he was writing for a solo record, so often I'm playing the root notes, reinforcing what he's been doing. I've always been a minimal bass player!"

KIM [re: the bass being a good songwriting tool]: "I would think the opposite. I was talking to Mike Watt about that and he was apologizing for his songs being really eccentric. I was in this band with Lydia Lunch and I was writing the songs on the bass for a change, and it was weird and difficult. I suppose it worked out okay for Paul McCartney, but he probably had a piano!"

THURSTON: [re: Rather Ripped] "We usually trick out our songwriting more, destroying the traditional aspects and reshaping our songs in risky ways. On this record, though, we let them exist in their primal state, without our getting too involved."

THURSTON

LEE: "The tuning is from, low to high, D or D# - I tune to D#, and Thurston usually goes for D - then C#, A#, D#, G and G."

The correct tuning is D#D#A#D#GG (for Lee) and DD#A#D#GG (for Thurston).

THURSTON