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--- In , Dan Bartley <bigtwangguy@y...>
wrote:
> Rockabilly echo is a short single slapback that sounds like an 8th
> note...bopbop. Hanks' guitar echo, IMHO was more like...bop...bop,
> the longer delay producing almost a reverbish sound.
Actually, more like bop...bop...bopbopbop...bop...bop...bopbopbop
The key to the Shadows echos is that the repeats were staggered since
those Italian echo machines had multiple heads that you could engage
in different ways. I know of no American player that ever made use
of that technology (but the Atlantics did in spades!). The Maestro
Echoplex didn't have multiple heads and thus wouldn't do the
staggered repeats. Only the likes of Meazzi, Binson, Klempt
(German), and a few others did that. That's a HUGE part of Hank's
early sound, and just like we keep regurgitating reverb settings and
tubes and mods on this list, on the Shadows lists it's all about
properly replicated the staggerings of the echo repeats!
>I've listened to Man Of Mystery a million times and still can't get
> over the fact that when he breaks into that wild solo part where
> he's bending the B string to an E at the 15th fret, he then
> resolves into an A major double stop kinda thing that just clashes
> with everything else thats going on. He does it over a minor 4 and
> then the minor 1. I wonder why he did that?
Obviously, I don't know, and probably no one else does either. But
here's my guess: Hank improvised all his solos in the early days
(which is proven by the recently released outtakes of songs like The
Savage, for example, which have very different solos than the one
we're used to). He probably just went for it, and that's what came
out! They listened to it, thought, 'wow, that's weird, but kinda
cool (a Shads track title, actually!), let's keep it.' And that was
probably all there was to it.
In the early days the Shadows were given three hours from beginning
to the end to record three songs. So, by the time the mics were set
up, they warmed up a bit, it probably meant at most two hours to
record songs of which they were often still working out the
arrangements. So, there wasn't much time to ponder a solo. Wam bam,
thank you m'am!
In fact, later in that song Hank drops the first note of the verse
melody, but they decided to keep the take anyway and release it - I
guess they either ran out of time, or thought that the energy and
feel was great, warts and all.
Ivan
