HW: Effects that Hawkwind use

[Doug Pearson]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2001 19:36:53 +0100, Captain Bl at ck <starfield at SUPANET.COM>
wrote:
>I take a line-out from Dave's guitar amp and feed it into Input 2 of the
>second EMS I use. The signal is then ring-modulated against a not-quite-
>pure sine-wave, and fed through a filter. The cut-off of the filter is
>then tweaked in real time using a joystick...
>
>...which is more or less the way Del did it on Doremi and Space Ritual.

Cool!  Thanks for the info!

>NEXT!

OK - Does the other axis of the joystick modulate the Ring Mod carrier
frequency?  Or is that fixed?  Or knob-tweaked?  (And if the former, does
the pitch match the key of the song or is it arbitrary ... or are you
referring to a sub-audio signal as the Ring Mod carrier to get a tremelo-
type effect [which might match the tempo of the song ... or not]?)

(Joystick axes for the considerably-smaller gig I played saturday:
#1X - LFO frequency - about .25Hz to 250Hz
#1Y - VCA controlling LFO triangle wave modulation amount
#2X - VCO/wavetable frequency - about 20Hz to 20kHz
#2Y - VCF cutoff - about 0Hz to 20kHz
... plus LFO square wave modulation amount, noise clock frequency, noise
filter cutoff & linear/audio-frequency modulation amount controlled with
the knobs; wavetable sweep EG triggered with button.  Damn those joysticks
are useful when playing keyboard melodies with one hand and synth noises
with the other!)

WRT the "Spirit of the Age" guitar intro effect - when we rehearsed this
for my short-lived (one gig!) tribute band, the guitarist experimented with
using both a tremelo pedal or a delay pedal for the "stuttering"/"choppy"
guitar sound, and found the latter to be far more effective.  You need to
tweak the delay time to match the rhythm you're trying to get, and then the
delay feedback/repeat setting to make sure there are enough repeats to fill
out the bar (the problem with a tremelo pedal is that, unless you're
playing the guitar through a compressor, or have a Les Paul that sustains-
for-days, the chords decay too quickly for the last repeats to be heard
properly).  Then, just hit the chord, immediately mute it, and let the
delay pedal do the work for you!  Either way, your bandmates need to
realize that the tempo of the song is established by the delay time/tremelo
rate.

And the essential guitar effect for the Doremi/Space Ritual era:
Coloursound Fuzz/Wah!

    -Doug (too-much-useless-info)
     jasret at mindspring.com