(dedicated to my brother & sister noise makers out there!)
I love music. I love sound! All sorts of music and all sorts of sounds! This love, coupled with a natural inclination to make music, is most likely what has led me to be a musician. I've also always been creative, so this has led me to create my own music. I prefer this to recreating someone else's sounds. It's been said that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery...but I just don't get it myself.
My favorite sound has always been that of breaking glass. This might sound odd to many...but if you understand the history of my affinity towards this sound, it makes sense.
The street I grew up on used to be a race track. From what I've always been told, where our house was is right about where the concession stand used to be. Over the hill, in the woods behind our house, were tons and tons of old, empty bottles. For a kid like me, this was a treasure trove! I could break the bottles on rocks, on each other, by throwing rocks at them, hitting them with big sticks...and when I got old enough, shooting them with a BB gun (and later, a pistol).
The sound of breaking glass mesmerized me. It was the sound of "something one shouldn't do"...sort of a taboo sound. It was the sound of destruction...but in that destruction, there was a brief moment of absolute sonic beauty.
Most people probably just hear CRASH when glass breaks. Not me. If you've ever closely listened to the sound of breaking glass, it starts with a very low, vibration that culminates in a high pitched smash. It covers a great deal of the sonic spectrum in the blink of an eye. To me, this has always been wondrous.
As a guitarist, I've long pursued that sound. A deep, low vibration at the core with that almost taboo "crash" at the outer edges of the tone. There have been times when I've nailed it and more times when I haven't. My old Telecaster Deluxe through my long gone old Ampeg amps (1st a Gemini 2 and later a V4) was how I managed it. These, however, required great volume. Anyone who knows anything about sound knows that long term exposure to this sort of volume leads to deafness. High frequency deafness, to be more exact.
My maternal grandmother was deaf (nerve deafness) and the thought of going deaf has always scared me...so I've tried to prevent it...yet still always dancing on that edge of OMFG THAT'S LOUD! When I was 22, I lost most of the hearing in my right ear due to a work-related incident. That scared the crap out of me. But...within a short period of time, I found that keeping the band on the side of my deaf ear kept my good ear sort of protected. We could play as loud as we wanted ("Shake the rafters!" my auntie would always tell me before a show) and I'd rarely have the ol' post show HUMMMMMMM at the end of the night (or the next day).
Throughout my decades of making music, I've learned to love all sorts of sounds. Thuds, thwacks, zings, jingles, jangles, whooshes, growls, whumps...almost anything. Anything except "plinky" sounds. I've never particularly cared for anything that goes "plink".
Case in point: some might hear the high notes on a piano and think they're plinky. They would be wrong. On most pianos, I find those high notes to sound more like fine crystal glasses being clinked together in a toast. A cheap guitar with no real volume behind it...that's plink. It's a short, nasty sound. It doesn't say anything beautiful to me. It's like a truly bad joke, at best.
I'm sure that if I really tried, I could learn to enjoy plinky sounds. Hell, I could probably even find a use for them. As a musician and composer, I reckon sounds the way a laborer reckons his tools. They're what's necessary to get the job done! Drums should go WHACK, THWACK, WHUMP & THUMP! A bass should have a good, solid, woody THUD (unless one is playing funk...then the highly overrated sound "Thwankapoppathwank" is the way to go...otherwise, go for that woody THUD!). Each instrument is blessed with it's own sounds. Mandolins can jangle or honk. Brass bleats, woodwinds breathe and snore, orchestral strings can sing, screech, and any other number of sounds. Cymbals are the poor man's breaking glass. Too much high end. Their sound is almost overwhelming. Cymbals don't share the beautiful low end vibration of breaking glass. This is probably why most guitarists complain about them. Cymbals tend to hog up the high end. That's our job! Gongs, on the other hand....just too cool!
I keep looking for new sounds. The click clack of my fingers typing this out on the keyboard of my laptop is not an unpleasing sound to me...although the sound of 50 pairs of hands, typing away at work can be distracting as hell to me. Yet, I still look for my breaking glass sound when I play electric guitar. It doesn't matter to me if I'm playing something twangy, jazzy, bluesy, or dissonant (I LOVE dissonance!), I still want that breaking glass sound. Maybe a bit less high end, now that my ears are getting a bit long in the tooth (so to speak) but still...I want that low vibration at the core cascading out to treble taboo! This is the real sound of the elusive twaaaaaaang that many search for. It's the sound of breaking glass. And it can scare the hell out of you.
Volume often scares people. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked "Does it have to be so loud?????". The looks in the eyes of the people asking this is FEAR. All fear ever is, is the unknown. Volume grabs people's attention, sure...but for an electric guitarist, it's much more. There's science and technology happening! Those tubes are heating up and the sound become richer, fuller, and well...more IN YOUR FACE at louder volumes.
I remember the first few times I ever dared to play LOUD. I had an old Gibson Skylark Tremolo amp...in all honesty, not a very loud amplifier as amps go...but to an 11 or 12 year old kid, it was a beast! I didn't know if it was going to blow up being played that loud (it eventually fried) but that sound! I was hearing my breaking glass sound coming from the notes of my guitar through that amp! When I was about 13, I'd moved up to a slightly better rig: a brand new Fender Musicmaster guitar and my Ampeg Gemini 2 amp. I thought this was cool until a family friend loaned me his old Guild Starfire 3 electric guitar. MAN O MAN! That guitar, through that amp, played LOUD was the greatest sound ever! To this day, I'm still trying to recreate that sound!
It's all a matter of tones, overtones, undertones, and even "in between tones". Those in between tones are what really get me anymore. Early on, I learned to bend strings...bending notes, chords, you name it. I tried for decades to learn how to play slide guitar....all to get to those sounds in between the other sounds. Western music tends to trap itself in a limited set of notes. There are a lot more out there...and in between the notes we're used to using. Just like the sound of breaking glass...there's so much sound to be heard and utilized!
I could go on for days about this. Hell, weeks, months, years even! This is my lifelong path. Chasing sound I guess you could call it. I'm pretty sure that's what Les Paul said...he was chasing sound. I keep chasing my favorite sound: breaking glass. I get it once in a while. Other times, I get something else...and I'm usually pretty happy with it. I try to stay true to myself and the sounds I hear in my head. I try to unleash them on the world and once in a while, the world enjoys it. The rest of the time, it's just me trying to make these sounds come together in a way that I find pleasing. Like I said, I like dissonance. I love the sound of breaking glass.
One last little personal bit of info: whenever I'm about to do a live performance, I say a little prayer. I ask God to speak through my hands, if He so chooses. Words are nothing more than sounds, structured in such a way that we assign them meaning. They're still nothing more than sounds. Listen to someone who speaks another language laugh or cry. You'll still understand what they're doing and feeling. It's all just sound.
"I use music as a medium to talk to people." - Sun Ra
"The planet is asleep and it's the fault of musicians who are not true to themselves." - Sun Ra
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