John Martyn - effects with acoustic guitar

Bob-Dubery

A recent thread got into the subject of using effects with acoustic guitars. Here's a clip of John Martyn in the 70s making use of echo, a volume pedal and .... err.... a drum machine.

Keira-WitherKay

yeah i love his playing but SURELY HE COULDA CHUCKED THE CHEESY DRUM MACHINE...ok it was cutting edge at that time the korg "i forget the model number... 55 i think " someone playing at his level coulda just had a live percussionist on stage............ sad very sad heheheh proberbly just too tight to pay the percussionist heheheh .......here's a great excuse i heard when i asked someone else why they use a drum machine and the said "you only need to pay for the drum machine once but you must pay the percussionist every show heheheh "

but yeah i love the piece and the effects are way cool and yeah well but one niggle.that damn drum machine spoils it .....

Bob-Dubery

Keira WitherKay wrote: yeah i love his playing but SURELY HE COULDA CHUCKED THE CHEESY DRUM MACHINE...ok it was cutting edge at that time the korg "i forget the model number... 55 i think " someone playing at his level coulda just had a live percussionist on stage............ sad very sad heheheh proberbly just too tight to pay the percussionist heheheh .......here's a great excuse i heard when i asked someone else why they use a drum machine and the said "you only need to pay for the drum machine once but you must pay the percussionist every show heheheh "

but yeah i love the piece and the effects are way cool and yeah well but one niggle.that damn drum machine spoils it .....

I've got a DVD of Martyn in solo action from a few years earlier. He resorts to an even more primitive drum machine on one track, and I did find it bothering.

He could and often did play with percussionists or drummers, but he did a lot of solo shows as well. I would think that for the odd track (EG the one we're discussing here) he needed something to set those long swells against. Maybe it would have been distracting and/or expensive to drag a percussionist around for just a couple of songs. On the DVD I mention he uses the drum machine for one song, the rest is entirely solo.

I think it was the slow song, with the reliance on effects that forced his hand. If he played a more rhythmic part on the guitar he'd have had to give up those long, slow swells that the song seems built around. Trapped maybe?

Bob-Dubery

OK.... her's Martyn with the FX in full flow but NO drum machine.

This is the sort of playing from Martyn that, I think, gave rise to the theory that he is a major influence on The Edge.

Martyn had a quite a percussive style of finger-picking. Here he combines that with the echo to great effect.

I note he's using a bolt-on magnetic pickup here. If you watch footage from this era he has two distinct sounds and is constantly changing leads around, which suggests to me that he has some kind of contact pickup in his guitar as well. I'd guess this goes to something else discussed on the forum - that some piezo pickups, and especially the passive setups, don't have sufficient oomph to drive stomp boxes and such.

From what I know of Martyn I'm guessing that here the echo unit is an Echoplex and the distortion unit is a Big Muff.

Squonk

The Edge must have been influenced, sounds like an intro to a U2 song

This just sounds so good, especially when his voice comes into the whole rhythm thing. John had an unfair advantage over other solo artists,his voice was like and extra instrument.

Good Stuff, I will be adding to my John Martyn Collection! ?

Bob-Dubery

Squonk wrote: The Edge must have been influenced, sounds like an intro to a U2 song

This just sounds so good, especially when his voice comes into the whole rhythm thing. John had an unfair advantage over other solo artists,his voice was like and extra instrument.

That's how I hear his vocals as well. Though that developed over the years, there's not so much of the deliberately slurred stuff on the earlier albums. Even on Solid Air (supposedly the defining Martyn album) he's not up to it on every song.

I think he's hugely underrated as a singer. Elsewhere on the forum is a post that I made with a link to a clip of him singing a Ben Harper song. He lays right off the guitar on that clip, but the vocal performance is marvellous.

Bob-Dubery

Found it.
http://www.guitarforum.co.za/youtube-guitar-videos/john-martyn-excuse-me-mister/