Sonic Youth: Classic or Dud/S&D?

I will credit Rolling Stone. In 1988 when Daydream Nation first came out, they gave it a rave review and made it sound delightful to impressionable teenagers like myself who were otherwise not hip to the scene.

Early 90s guitar mags for me, I think.

Also how I found out about MBV.

Really good Kim list Alfred, love most of those (and like all)! Here are a few I haven't seen others throw out that I think are pretty excellent Kim songs and may make my list on any given day:

Massage the History > The Eternal
Shaking Hell > Confusion is Sex
Starpower > Evol
'Cross the Breeze > Daydream Nation

I really love that pretty much any attempt to list Sonic Youth songs brings drastically different results. I will say that "'Cross the Breeze" gets special nods for the way the intro acts on my animal brain. I love it to death and have trouble not turning it up extremely loudly every time I play it. "Starpower" probably the one that would cut first if I had to make a cut.

Watching 1991 atm. (I had a voucher - haven't watched it since I had it on video).

Everyone is unbearable.

the dance

the dance

the sucky wucky dance

i need this elixir. this elixir of... skinhead violence.

There's a bit on the extras where Thurston yells "Courtney Love is in love with the singer from Smashing Pumpkins".

IT'S FUCKIN LIVE MAN

I always knew Sonic Youth used wacky tunings. But it wasn't until today when I went through some stuff with a guitar friend and this chart (http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/tab/tuning.html) that I understood that apparently with the exception of the first EP and, weirdly enough, the song "Mildred Pierce," the band used insane tunings on seemingly literally *every single song.* That's just bonkers!

Yep. In the Aug 91 issue of Guitar Player, the band and Joe Gore broke down a bunch of their riffs and compared what you'd have to do to approximate them in standard. Despite being a fan for ages, I never played much of their stuff, at least not faithfully, out of nervousness as to what a lot of those tunings might do to my guitars tbh.

Yeah, we were talking about the need for different strings at least, let alone some custom guitars, to handle the (literal) stress.

That's why it seemed so devastating to me when all their gear was stolen in 1999 -- so much of it was modified.

What we couldn't figure out is if one guitarist is in a batshit tuning, then how does the other guitarist pick his totally different batshit tuning? Like, does Thurston work out a song in some strange tuning, bring it to Lee, and Lee thinks, ah, what this need is (insert equally strange tuning here). Take something familiar, like "Teenage Riot." Thurston is apparently in G-A-B-D-E-G, which is plenty weird. But how and why did Lee pick G-G-D-D-G-G for his guitar? And why *is* "Mildred Pierce" pretty much the the only song in their entire catalog in standard tuning?

this is dope

My neighbor was their guitar tech, he has a lot of stories lol.

Get him on this thread

I remember spending hours upon hours pouring over that tuning section despite having no ability to play a guitar. I remember finding it slightly amusing that thurston sorta settled into the pavement tuning as his default.

xpost: well G-G-D-D-G-G is basically a 5th power chord; it's going to work over anything in G regardless

Yeah, that example seems p 'straightforward' in musical terms. G major pentatonic vs G5 makes sense. Generally, it seems like they thought like composers rather than guitarists. xps

Generally, it seems like they thought like composers rather than guitarists.

Maybe that's because they started playing in Glenn Branca's guitar ensembles?

I mean Thurston and Lee.

I honestly think that aspect of their writing is a bit overstated. It's more that the strange tunings freed them up to try new things, whether approaches to actually physically playing the guitar or the sounds the guitar made. I'm not sure how much, I dunno, theory was put to work here.

So yeah, speaking of which, here are a couple of observations we made (my friend really knows guitar, but I do not, so bear with me!). There are some songs where the odd tuning serves a pretty clear purpose. Lee has talked about the "Judy Blue Eyes" tuning (something like EEEEBE), which allowed Stephen Stills to sort of drone along sitar-style with the lower strings while allowing him to play conventional lead with the standard tuning high strings. That's one application of a weird tuning. Another, as I think linee eludes to above, is that even in a tuning the guitars often have a sort of default key that can often be discerned in the song. But the third category of songs were ones we came across where the guitars were weird and yeah, one or both might have had a default key - but the song was still played in a *different* key (I hope that I am explaining that right). That is, what it seems the strange tuning is designed to allow is not what it's being used for, if that makes any sense.

And then I guess there is that extra-odd final category of "Mildred Pierce," which again is literally the only song afaict in virtually the entire catalog that is in standard but ... probably doesn't need to be, because they're just making noise while the bass carries the hook?

An intriguing counterpoint to this is a band like Fugazi. Fugazi operates afaict exclusively in standard tuning, but the parts are so creative and well worked out that they're able to imo evince a squall about as diverse and distinctive as Sonic Youth.

I remember getting a copy of Guitar Player magazine back around the time of Daydream Nation with an interview and some tabs with tunings and trying out the parts for Silver Rocket. I was kinda shocked upon discovering it was mostly one finger barre chords.

For the sake of comparison, Live Skull also wrote all of their material in standard tuning; albeit what they were doing was a slightly more hard-rock variant on the 80s NY noise thing. I suppose you can approximate a lot of what SY were doing in standard tuning esp. on their more pop/rock moments, but it's really only an approximation; it'll never sound exactly right - of course, it's a different story when thinking of actually composing this material.

xpost Someone mentioned that 1991 issue, which I couldn't find online but apparently the crux is how *hard* it is to play a lot of the songs in standard!

I'm pretty sure it's this one, despite not mentioning them on the cover -

https://dr-guitar-music.myshopify.com/products/guitar-player-magazine-february-1989-the-art-of-improvisation-cover

I love stuff like these pictures, where the guitar is labeled not only with tunings, but string gauge specifications! http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/eq/gtr124.html

Roger Miller from Mission of Burma used a lot of self created alt tunings, feel like he belongs in the convo

though he was definitely the most formally trained guy of any of the ppl mentioned

Yeah, he was classically trained, right?

For wacky tunings it seems that, besides the more obvious folk and blues precursors, it really springs up in the ... '60s? Stephen Stills, Joni Mitchell and really Ry Cooder spearheaded a lot of it, I think, at least in western music. And Davey Graham, Nick Drake, etc. Keith Richards got so much mileage from open G (which he learned from Cooder). And then post-punk there was a mix of primitivism and provocation, probably, with some tunings. "Lost in the Supermarket" is in open E, for some reason. A lot of the English Beat is DADAAD, which Dave Wakeling nicknamed "DAD-ODD" (since he was trying to tune to DADGAD). Mission of Burma (EEEAAA?), Sonic Youth, Pavement all get pretty wacky at times.

John Fahey

his first stuff was in the 50s

He was inspired by Charlie Patton, right?

Just read that Curtis Mayfield tuned to open F#, to match the black keys on a piano. Then there's Fripp, whose fucked up New Standard Tuning (CGDAEG) is tuned sort of like .... a cello?

Some of these can apparently be approximated with a capo, though.

I forgot about Pavement. On "Cut Your Hair" Spiral is in standard, but Malkmus is in CGDABE. "In The Mouth A Desert" both guitars are GGDGBE.

(Wait'll they find out about King Crimson these days: EADGBE, CGDAEG, and CGDAEBF#C#G#D#! In symphony orchestras, some of the strings are tuned in fifths and some in fourths, and then there's the harp!)

Yeah, I remember reading that sometimes Belew would retune a random string, just as a challenge.

Fahey loved early blues 78s, Patton etc but also Indian classical and modern classical...he def did not see himself as part of the folk revival and in fact (aside from in general being a cantankerous dick a lot of the time) held a lot of that in contempt....obv he pitched himself as "American Primitive"...but honestly he's IMO one of the handful of 20th century musicians that was kinda sui generis

like for example, the dissonant but sunny overtones in "Sligo River Blues" seem so modern for something that came out in 1959, like Still, Cooder, Joni or anyone like that was probably just doing rock n roll or hootenanny stuff still in 59

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21HwdNkzYq0

I didn't mean that Thurston and Lee had studied classical theory or anything but that the musical ideas seem like they came before the guitar chops, whether they arose from experimentation or from something more thought-out. We're doing something in G: why not tune one guitar to a pentatonic scale and the other to a six-string power chord. Makes sense if you're thinking about (or hearing/feeling) the key of G but counter-intuitive if you're used to playing in G on a standard guitar and your fingers know where to go. It does get you voicings and timbres you wouldn't get in standard, though.

I might be able to scan some of those pages from the Aug 91 issue w TM on the cover later on btw. I finally found a copy a little while ago after some searching.

Thurston and Lee were definitely coming from the "fuck it, sounds cool" approach. It was a deliberately primitive technical approach that made more expansive music possible than they could have pulled off with their traditional guitar skills.

Unwound is another band that used some weird tunings.

Polvo too

The Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground. EVERYBODY.

Following on from some thoughts from above in re the approaches / reasons why the SY tunings ended up they way they did, they have gone on record more than a few times to just stress that each new tuning was a new song for a while (or an opportunity for one). So, you can imagine, either Thurston or Lee fucks with a new tuning and suddenly a whole bunch of new riffs / chord progressions come out (that require no new fingerings or technical approaches as the tuning itself adds all the new voicings etc.) Pretty liberating, especially if you grew up in the era when they did and you saw the electric guitar get mastered and canonized in many many ways by the time it came to them to contribute. New tunings would be an easy way to attempt bypass a lot of that baggage / history (at least mentally). But yeah, relating to another thought above, I am sure a new tuning led to the immediate things that were possible in the "key" of the combined two-guitar approach, and then once you move through some of that obvious territory playing within that tuning in a different key would be the logical next step as you explore the tunings. (Sorry, I am sure I am retreading a lot here, but as someone who plays in alternate tunings myself, that I created on the fly without referencing other tunings, I relate very heavily to this. Sonic Youth was definitely my template as well, as far as the mentality and approach.)