Help me rediscover my Johnny Marr mojo..

blobb · May 14

Interesting. I've been watching a lot of the live concert footage available on The Smiths Live YT channel, particularly the later '86 tours with Craig Gannon. Johnny really goes for this low/mid + high range thing. Craig mainly plays the Scotty Moore with JM on the L series Strat. Then they switch around and JM goes for the Les Paul with Craig on a tele. So low/mid + high all the time.

This appears to a development of the Fender + JC combination he started out with but this time with a much more pronounced sound to it. You can hear how dirty and raw he makes the LP when he uses that. Not jangly at all . You can see why he maybe got a bit anoyed at that tag.

I've been trying to recreate some of these combinations in Amplitube and I think compression and EQ play a massive part in it all. Around this time he had a trio of amps on stage: some sort of Fender/ JC / Mesa. CG had two types of Fender behind him. I wonder what the signal routes were?

swiller · May 14

blobb said:

Yeah, I've been watching his videos a lot, they are really excellent representations.

I got hold of a bootleg tape of the Oxford Apollo gig years ago and listened to it to death. When I worked in Oxford for a while I even stood outside and got someone to take my picture, how sad is that! So I love that he is trying to re-create the guitar sounds from that night:

https://headlessguitarist.com/other-stuff/marr-live-1985/

One thing I haven't tried is a compressor up front. I don't have one to hand, only in a rack unit which I might hook up when I've got the basics right.

Not sad at all. As heartfelt has said, and adam does in his bio on his vids. Compressor up front does seem to be how it is done.

Heartfeltdawn · May 15

blobb said:

This appears to a development of the Fender + JC combination he started out with but this time with a much more pronounced sound to it. You can hear how dirty and raw he makes the LP when he uses that. Not jangly at all . You can see why he maybe got a bit anoyed at that tag.

I've been trying to recreate some of these combinations in Amplitube and I think compression and EQ play a massive part in it all. Around this time he had a trio of amps on stage: some sort of Fender/ JC / Mesa. CG had two types of Fender behind him. I wonder what the signal routes were?

The Old Grey Whistle Test performance from May 1986 saw Marr using a Fender Bandmaster, JC, and the Mesa. This link taalks about everything from that era right down to the rack gear.

http://www.smithsonguitar.com/2008/12/johnny-marrs-gear.html

Marr in this period really did get raw at times right down to using a Boss HM-2.

I think the signal routes were pretty easy even when the rack gear came in. I can't recall seeing anything mentioned about big effect loop switchers or the like. I think it's pretty safe to think it was guitar-->pedals-->rack gear-->amps in the Smiths days.

Heartfeltdawn · May 15

swiller said:
Not sad at all. As heartfelt has said, and adam does in his bio on his vids. Compressor up front does seem to be how it is done.

I like having the compressor at the very end became it lets me balance everything out. Back when I used solid state amps, a lot of the time I'd go direct into the power amps and bypass the preamps. I'd use a Tim and a Diamond compressor as my preamp. My #1 setup was a pair of Peavey Bandits left and right and then a valve amp in the middle. Delay and chorus effects would be in stereo on the Peaveys (preamps bypassed, straight into the effect return), dirt on the valve. You could get some massive sounds out of it. Pedalboard at the time wasn't too complex either really, basically some drive into the Diamond/Tim combo, this signal then got split into two.

1 - went into a Boss GT-3 and stereo chorus. The onboard pedal was used for volume and reverb swells.
2 - off to the valve amp with maybe another dirt pedal on there. Very light reverb or none at all on this amp.

blobb · May 15

Wonder how he utilised 3x amps then? Fender for the lo/mid and either the JC / Mesa, depending on strat or LP in use, or did he always have both JC/Mesa running in stereo for the highs, like your setup? If CG had 2x Fender amps are they in stereo all the time with just the guitar swap changing tone or did he use one for the Scotty Moore and one for the tele? I'm over thinkng this now but however he routed them the key is Fender lo/mid and some sort of treble focused high end sound on top, working complementary to a second guitarist doing the opposite. His sound is all about frequency range.

If you watch some of JM Jaguar promo videos he talks about getting everything out of one guitar and his multi effects pedal, which he wished he had had back in those days, adding slight tonal variations on the f/x unit using a couple of add on foot switches.

So the progression was: stereo amps / stereo guitarists with multiple amps / single multi range guitar with flexible fx box.

Heartfeltdawn · May 15

Yes, it's all about frequency ranges. Perhaps the amp setup was just as simple as him turning some up and some down depenidng on the song. It's like Cressa's role in the Stone Roses, there just to change presets on Squire's Midiverb.

And sometimes the simple works. Have a look at this auction of Marr's MB rack gear from the The The days. Loving the marks on the knobs denoting where to put everything.

https://propstoreauction.com/lot-details/index/catalog/359/lot/119186

Decorativeed · May 15

blobb said:

Danny1969 said:

Moat essential bit of hear I purchased to sound like Marr was a capo ... he loves a capo

Yes, I forgot to add. Capo on F# helped a lot. Morrisey wasn't a particularly good singer by all accounts. Who knew?

Project Marr shall continue tonite. I got waylaid, not in an alley by a railway station but by playing a folk session last night and now I'm all jigged out. It all helps though, JM was / is a big folk fan. There are an awful lot of folk tune styles hidden away in his stuff.

I used to work at HMV in Manchester and Johnny was a fairly regular customer. I worked downstairs and he'd often come in and chat to a colleague of mine who was a big folk fan about Bert Jansch and John Renbourn and stuff I'd never heard of previously like Steffen Basho-Junghans. But then I also remember him ordering a Beach Boys box set and we fought over who'd get to ring him up and tell him it had arrived. I won. And got through to his answer machine.

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Help me rediscover my Johnny Marr mojo..

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