FLINGEL BUNT WITH THE STRYMON VOLANTE

[dave robinson]

Here's a quick take of Flingel Bunt with my new Strymon Volante echo box showing the 'grunt' on the repeats.

https://soundcloud.com/dave-robinson-85 ... nt-strymon

[Iain Purdon]

Wow! At last, a version ol Flingel Bunt that stands comparison with the original.

It's not the same but (a very important 'but') you've found aspects of the original tone, echo and attack that nobody else seems able to get. Really made my day!

Thanks Dave

Iain

PS - great backing band

[roger bayliss]

Excellent Dave ... MIDI implementation next

[dave robinson]

This is just a plug in and play effort from having a quick listen to the original and twiddling the Volante's knobs to somewhere close.
This morning I've been studying the different echo sounds on the Shadows early recordings and I'm hearing different echo tones and varying levels of overload, all of which make the sound what we have come to love. It's rare to hear two of the major hits with identical echo settings which makes it very interesting as well as frustrating when you play this stuff to make a living with people too ready to point out that it's wrong. I take solace in knowing that the same critics haven't got a clue how to replicate it either, with of course the exceptions of our friends in Australia. They have dug deep and cracked it and I now appreciate the work that Paul put in to a achieve this.
The lock down has focused me to look at this in more detail as I have the time to spend and I enjoy it immensely.
I do appreciate the constructive comments that people make and I thank you Iain for recognising the same sound that I had heard from this device and confirming that my ears were working. It's to do with saturation and feedback, something I have never quite got my head around (I'm talking about feedback and which head here) and I stumbled across it whilst playing and moving knobs around yesterday. I'm off now to try and fine tune it and get it the same.

[dave robinson]

Further to what I have already said I have to say it would help if we could find out which echo unit was actually used on Flingel Bunt, as this is close but not spot on.
There's no race to get it the same, so I'm just going to enjoy playing again and experimenting with the various bits of kit at my disposal.
Thinking about it, if the distortion on Flingel Bunt was deliberate it was possibly one of the first records to use the saturation in a musical fashion as fuzz boxes weren't really around in early '64. I got the very early Gibson fuzz box in '65, then graduated to the Zonk Machine which was a Tone Bender with another name from JHS in Leeds. We had worked with The Yardbirds just as Jeff Beck had joined them (64/65) and he hadn't yet introduced the Tonebender at that point. He had got one the next time we were on the bill with them in 1966.

[Iain Purdon]

Flingel Bunt was recorded in the same session as Big B so the setup ought to be similar, although the playing style isn't.

Here's a mashup of two sections that might help with the analysis?

https://clyp.it/hbqs3lmz.mp3?token=bf8993131dfa9cb2fc2bfe25ce021013

[dave robinson]

Yes it was recorded on 25 February 1964 and if I remember an article in one of the music papers of the time it said that The Shadows were messing around jamming and came across the riff which evolved into the hit single.
I managed to get Hank isolated on the track to study the echo and It sounds like the setting and feedback is from head *2, I used head *4. Is it possible that the Baby Binson was used on this, as I thought I remembered seeing Hank with one of those around that period. The Baby Binson has a slightly different sound tonewise to the Echorec as well as slightly different head spacings and speed. Just a thought but it could explain the anomalies compared to the Meazzi which I suspect would have been kippered by 1964.

[fenderplucker]

Hi Dave,

For Flingel Bunt, try a Long Tom setting of 6 heads spaced about 77mSec apart, with heads 3 and 6 about 4-5 dB above the other 4 heads and feedback from the last head (6).

With regard to distortion, I think that the first intentional use was possibly in 1960 on The Stranger where an over-driven Meazzi is is much in evidence.

Regards,

Paul.

[dave robinson]

Thanks for that Paul, l'll try it on the Echo Designer in Logic, but it's not so much the heads that are hard to copy it's the tone of the repeats, without messing up the tone of the guitar. I find the Strymon gives something near the tone by saturating the heads, which is what I'm calling 'the grunt'. I really need to get out more.

[fenderplucker]

Hi Dave,

As sell as the correct echo timing, you are quite right about the importance of the head distortion and saturation in reproducing the crunch (or grunt, as you say) of the echoes from the drum Meazzis, and also how this changes depending upon how hard the signal is driven. Very few of the commonly available digital echo units or DAW plug-ins manage to get even close.

However, I couldn't find any indication in the specification sheet for the Volante that the head spacings and levels can be set to match any of the drum Meazzis. Is this correct ?