Jack here, jbf music and guitar lessons, back with some more quick guitar tricks for you-
this “must know” really fun bit of noise guitar!
First up a huge shout out to John Rambo for their continued support on Patreon!
In this quick guitar tricks we’re looking at a the notorious ray gun style sound effect.
While I’ve covered more obscure harmonic technique; like the seven with the little
I up there, or how to catch a natural harmonic, so that you can add vibrato to it for reasons
unclear to me I’ve oddly enough not covered what is arguably the best one!
Looking at the standard one, how you can pimp it up- do people even say that anymore, or
am I really showing my age there? And the different approach that Steven Stevens; best
know for his stuff with Billy Idol; used on their song Rebel Yell. You can jump to any
of these bits using the chapters below.
As usual tabs and that sort of thing are up at Patreon.com/Jbfmusic- if you like harmonics
and novelty sounds as much as I do, then leave me ‘noise guitar gang’ comment and give
like a click.
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Ok, we’ll go over the basic technique first off, pick the string and slowly bring your
finger down towards it until it barely touching it. Adjust till you hear the harmonic- the
5th fret is a good place to start. Now simply move your hand up and down the string while
still maintaining that same level of pressure. Add in some trem picking. That’s it!
So I really like the low E string around the 3rd fret .
And also the g string, not idea why, but that one seems to get the most interesting sounding
harmonics to my ears. Picking near the bridge can help let the harmonic ring out a bit more,
but you’ll get a brasher tone from doing that.
Aside
from being a novelty sound, this can be integrated into riffs, Iron Maiden’s track ‘Killers’
being a great example; you can check out how to play that with the I up there. But here
we’ll look at the smashing pumpkins song Zero; as a side note the original riff is
in Eb tuning, I’m staying in standard here.
this might take a bit of trial and error or fiddling about, but you more or less want
to hit there harmonics .
As bonus tip of sorts, just like the killers riff, if you have one guitar doing the harmonics
and another playing just the open string, you cana pretty cool sound- the floaty harmonics
and more solid chug of the open string.
Now! We can also alternate the strings we hit while moving our hands, I’m going with
the D and G strings like this In theory if you were good enough at this; and I’m not,
happy to admit that!; you could get harmonics on more than one string. So lets try those
two and sort of trem pick through both of them; for a quick video on how to do that
check out that little I; Ok, and we can try that across all the
strings again, you might have to bear with me a bit here!
We can also play beyond the fretboard; above the pickups same idea, lightly rest your finger
on the string and pick at it- the lower wound strings tend to yield the best results for
me
The next thing we can do is add effects, personally alternating between the G and D strings with
a bit of delay is something I whack on as many songs as I can; admittedly it’s rarity
that it fits the vibe so all the more pleasing when it works out!
Some other effect to experiment with would be; Fuzz, Chorus, Flanger Phaser- you know
some sort of modulation thing, tremello or a pitch shifter. Wild and crazy option, combine
a few of these!
I’ve opted for a combination of whammy pedal, phaser set to a quick rate, octave distortion,
flanger set slow and some delay.
Ok, so
just
before we tackle that Ray Gun Effect in Rebel Yell, if you
still here and have been enjoying this so far you might as well give subscribe a click
and enable all notifications that way you’ll be kept up to date with the content getting
put out here. But yeah, he basically held a toy ray gun to his guitar! The pickups still
‘pick up’ some of the noise through the guitar- like how you can get a guitar to sound
like a phone- 3 ways of doing that with the little I up there.
Sadly I don’t have a toy ray gun- all the more reason to support me on Patreon.com/jbfmusic
– oh man, hahaha! Oh dear, but yeah, you can
play a sound from you phone, tablet or whatever and the pickups will do their best to transmit
the sound.
Now! Me being me and this channel being the over the top exploration of all things guitar
that it is; as long term viewer will know- shout out to the lick squad elite- you guys
rock!; why stop there?!?!? Let’s add effects on top of this sound being played through
the pick ups!!
And if you want even more fun noises to play around with, check out that video. This has
been quick guitar tricks, that’s the playlist there. But yeah, hit subscribe to keep up
to date with the channel, leave me a comment, check out the tabs on my Patreon and enable
notifications by ringing that little bell on the side, if you feel so inclined, cheers
guys!