Preparing for the 8/2 BowieVision Performance
This coming Saturday, my band BowieVision is performing at Nectar in Seattle. We are working on a few new songs for this performance, including “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)”, from the Scary Monsters album. It’s another time I have to recreate the frenetic 1980s guitar sound of Robert Fripp. On this track, I believe he is using a Watkins Electric Music (WEM) Project V fuzz pedal, an extraordinarily rare guitar effect that he also used on the Brian Eno recordings of the same period. This pedal can produce a classic buzz-saw fuzz effect (think “Satisfaction” by the Stones) and also has a primitive bit-crusher effect that deconstructs the sound into almost a ring-modulation tone.
It’s an interesting challenge replicating this tone in the AxeFX. For the guitar parts in “Fashion”, I use a complex stacked tone with two separate effects chains, with dedicated amps and cabinets for each part of the overall tone. During the two solo sections I switch to separate scenes with additional gain and modulation intensities.
Without question, Robert Fripp’s guitar parts are the most challenging aspect of this band to recreate. His sound and playing is unique and idiomatic unto itself. I have listened to mister Fripp’s playing in many settings, and appreciate how he approaches music. It’s a fun puzzle to work out his parts and play them live. After our recent Triple Door performance, an audience member complimented me on having navigated those difficult solos in “Fashion” with an authentic tone. That really means a lot to me, since those parts total less sixty seconds of music and took several days to work out.