Sonic Youth: Classic or Dud/S&D?

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.)

What I'm trying to say is that alternate tunings are very common and can be used in a number of different ways. SY's rhythmic approach and deliberate inexact tuning (because they liked the sound of unison notes slightly-out-of-tune) are a bigger part of who they are than their tunings -- to say nothing of Kim's approach to bass playing and singing. (x-post.)

There are weird tunings, and then there are WEIRD TUNINGS. Like the kind that distress your guitars and break strings and stuff. Most bands don't go that far.

Oh yeah, agreed Three Word Username. Blues, slack key / Hawaiian music, any lap / table / pedal steel instrument, lots of folk music, etc. etc. etc. SY's take on it certainly a bigger part of it (more a blunt object than intricate exploration) than just the tunings themselves. It is also very clear that Kim drove a lot of aspects of the sounds. Her playing rules.

The big difference between American primitive/blues/grass tuning and noisy indie rock is that the fingerpicking forms use tuning for melodic effect - to make a bassline practical for the thumb, to make it easier to hit certain notes in arpeggios. The weird tuning in rock are mostly about texture and the effects of amplification. - maximizing the discordant, then quickly finding harmony, or falling into drone with lots a overtones.

(tho' yeah, Fahey and disciples also tune for drone...)

...and Sonic Youth arpeggiate all the time, so what were you saying?

Sonic Youth style tunings aren't generally useful for fingerpicking styles where you're doing a bassline and melody on one instrument, and fingerpicking style tunings aren't generally useful to get the dramatic shifts in tone and texture of a noisy band.

Given that I think the best proof that what you say here is wrong are the very examples you use to argue for this point -- SY and Fahey -- I think I'll just leave you to your ears.

There are weird tunings, and then there are WEIRD TUNINGS. Like the kind that distress your guitars and break strings and stuff. Most bands don't go that far.

Yeah, I do think tunings like F#F#GGAA go further than the tunings that Jimmy Page or Joni Mitchell used (and are related to the deliberately inexact approach to tuning mentioned above; when e.g. you tune in not-quite-unison pairs, it is easier to have beat tones ringing every time you strum open strings.)

When I played in Branca's 13th btw, he asked us to bring our cheapest guitar and specified string gauges (I think I had 2 low Es, 2 middle Es, 2 high Es?)

Right, the tunings are designed to create weird, dissonant overtones.

barely anyone covers SY but i don't know — because the tunings/overtones would be tough to re-create, it might be interesting for people to just try out the songs in different forms/modes ... (my high school band played "silver rocket" in standard tuning)

Some of the Sonic Youth guitar pics will have the string gauges on the back of the headstock if you match it up to the song/tuning that guitar was used on.

Nels Cline did a nice big band version of "Snare, Girl" on Lovers.

People sometimes slag off their 'tuneless' singing, and I'm not going to make any great claims for their vocal chops, but it did occur to me some time ago that it would be a lot harder to sing 'in tune' over dense chords of detuned strings than over idk "Amazed" by Lonestar.

Danish guy plays about 150 acoustic, instrumental Sonic Youth covers:

http://www.youtube.com/user/nvanliforp/videos

Oh yeah, I linked him a year ago. (I thought he was from Chile then, for some reason.) A lot of it works, esp later material.

This one immediately came to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crcc42h5Ouc

Not this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkvbWzRes6w

"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?

I don't think this is accurate btw. The guitarists play fairly straightforward punk/postpunk riffs (and even do that triplet figure) for the whole thing until the last 30s. The power chords do sound pretty 'normal' compared to how SY usually play open fifths imo.

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.

I am a man of my word, if belatedly: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18it36EojywZqYd1mbwjQIzAwYpG-ifOq/view?usp=sharing

The transcriptions are on the last three pages. The interview, on the first six, is pretty good: they discuss how their backgrounds with art school and working with Branca and Chatham influence their compositional approaches, their extended techniques, and Joe Satriani's admiration of them, among other things.

Nice, thanks for the scans Sund4r.

Np, hope you enjoy

How I'd rank'em tbh.

can someone explain to me the love that A Thousand Leaves receives?

i didn't get it when it was released, and i still don't get it today--- though i admit to liking the Ranaldo joints from that record.

the rest of it sounds like the worst sort of overindulgent guitar noodling. and the "Hits of Sunshine" track is fucking insufferable.

okay, so maybe not all of it— just looking at my copy, i realize there are some great tracks on it.

i think it's more that the record is praised for the moments that i find most boring— oh great, thurston's using a wah pedal again!— and not for the parts that seem more energetic.

duuude I was just talking with someone last week abt how this was their fave, and both of us raved abt Hits OfSunshine. So loose, trippy, and zoned, with Steve Shelley gluing it all together. My favorite post-Washing Machine track of theirs.

murray st and goo are definitely good-to-great. mostly great

Murray St is up there with Daydream Nation and Bad Moon Rising in my SY Top 3

re A Thousand Leaves: "Sunday," "Hits of Sunshine," and especially "Hoarfrost." The Gordon tracks are the weakest, actually.