Συνέντευξη του Cesar Diaz (περίφημου τεχνικού των SRV, Stones, Clapton...)

[bloody_sunday]

Ιδού μια από τις πιο απολαυστικές συνεντεύξεις που έχω διαβάσει ποτέ, όχι μόνο από την πλευρά του guitar tech geek, αλλά και της μουσικής ιστορίας και των ιδιαίτερα γοητευτικών trivia που την συνοδεύουν. Είναι του Cesar Diaz, μουσικού και διάσημου guitar tech(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_D%C3%ADaz), που απεβίωσε το 2002.

Θα τη βρείτε εδώ: http://www.tonequest.com/ray.htm

(Mερικά από τα εφφέ και ενισχυτές που έφτιαχνε, μαζί με τις διάσημες τροποποιήσεις που εφάρμοζε, πωλούνται ακόμη: http://www.diazmusicalproducts.com/)

Αξίζει πραγματικά να την τυπώσετε και να την διαβάσετε με την ησυχία σας. Δεν είναι μόνο ένα σεμινάριο για κάθε κιθαρίστα και guitar tech, αλλά και μια εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρουσα ματιά στην ζωή αυτών των τόσο σημαντικών μουσικών.

Ιδού μερικά αποσπάσματα... επί ορισμένων έχουν προηγηθεί άπειρες συζητήσεις κι εδώ στο φόρουμ, αλλά καθώς προέρχονται από έναν τέτοιο άνθρωπο αποκτούν ιδιαίτερη σημασία:

My friend Steve Jacobs told me, “Man, you have to see this guy play – he’s really got the Blues,” and I said, “No white man has ever had the Blues. You don’t know what’s it’s like to be called a nigger.” I’m pretty brown myself, and I’ve been called a few names in my life. I’m the only guy I know that has changed race 8 times in a decade. Now, I’m like, "Latino," which is really hip today… So I went to see Stevie and he was great, man, but he had the worst tone in the world.
What amps was he using?

He was using the VibroVerbs, but they needed servicing, and the guitar needed to be set up. He wasn’t fully on top of his form yet.

When and where was this?

1979 I believe, at a place called the Psychedeli...Psychica-Deli.

And he was using 2 Vibroverbs…

Exactly, both with JBL’s. I walked up to him and said, “Man, you’re a great player, but your tone sounds like shit.” I’ve never been one to say no to a fight – I have a few scars – I’ve been around, but I’ve never run away from anybody, so I was prepared for this Texan guy to get cocky with me, but he was just the opposite – just a really nice guy. So, when I told him he sounded like shit, he said, “Really?” and I said, “Yeah, and I can help you.” He said, “Well what can you do for me?” I explained to him that we could match transformers, match tubes, and change the filter caps, and make those amps sound brand new with genuine vintage parts.

At that time I had all of the original parts and back then they were only 10 years old, you know? I truly believe that a lot of this “new old stock” is nothing but a bluff. It’s only my opinion, but from experience I think all of that stuff has a shelf life – tubes, for example. It doesn’t do a tube any good to be sitting around for 30-40 years. And tube matching – all of those Fender amps were unbalanced, and they’re push/pulls to begin with, so sure, it would help to have matched tubes, but it wasn’t super necessary. That’s not something they did at the factory, sitting there matching tubes and resistors, testing each part. They’d just put them on and every once in awhile one was magical and the next one would be suck-ass. That’s mainly why I never played a Stratocaster, because out of all the guitars that Fender made, those were the most inconsistent – you could find 1 that sounded great and 20 that sounded horrible.
Why?

Because of the way they were set up, and because of the pickups. They didn’t say, “Lets put the weakest one in the neck position, the next weakest one in the middle, and the strongest pickup on the bridge.” They didn’t realize things like that until much later on.

Anyway, spending all of that time examining and testing those pickups when I was young and had the time, I realized that all of the pickups from that era were about 200 turns off, and the resistance was much lower. And I began to put this together – why was Hendrix only using the post CBS guitars with the big headstocks? You’ll see very few pictures of him playing a pre CBS Strat, even though Jimi had access to any guitar that was ever made – Les Paul Standards, all of the Strats, Broadcasters – all of that stuff was around to be given to him for free. Why did he choose to only use Stratocasters from that period? To begin with, the bigger headstock gives you more sustain, because the more meat you have on the neck, the more sustain you’re going to get. But also, the least amount of gain you have coming out of the pickups, the better it’s going to sound when you run through a fuzzbox or any kind of gain device. Obviously, Jimi wasn’t a very scientific guy – he just did it because it sounded good, but in any case, that’s what he chose to do for a specific reason.
When I was at the Fender Custom Shop, I asked Abigail Ybarra if the winding machine was off in the counter. Her eyes got huge and she said, “How do you know that?” I said, “Well, I’ve taken a lot of pickups apart and I know that you wound them by turns, and I’ve seen published figures that so many turns equalled so much resistance.” Personally, I’ve never gone strictly by the number of turns, I’ve always checked the resistance. No matter what my counter would say, I’d always test the resistance when it looked like the coil was getting fat at certain points. I’d set it up so that the neck pickup would be about 5.5K or 5.75K, and go only up to 6.0K ohms – any more than that and you’re just going to get mud. I know that because I’ve had hundreds of pickups go through my hands.

So to sum it up, the Strat pickups of the mid to late 60’s were of lower resistance – weaker – and because of that they sounded better when combined with certain gain-boosting effects…

Yeah, it made them clearer and more appropriate for being used with a lot of different effects.

...  

Anyway, I sent messages to both Lenny Kravitz and Eric Johnson that part of the secret to getting great tone was using weaker pickups and coil cables. The coil cables add a lot of capacitance and inductance to your signal chain, therefore, when you’re playing through a Marshall, you’re cutting back on the high frequencies.

When we were doing the In Step album with Stevie, I had an endorsement with Monster Cables. They would send me all of this free stuff and I was very excited because I could manage these things for a guy like Stevie, who really didn’t even know how to wash dishes. All he knew how to do was play the guitar, but God bless him for that, because he really did something with what he knew. Anyway, I took these cables we got to Stevie and he said, “I hate these things.” I asked him, “Why, man, they’re the best cables in the world?” He said, “They pass too much electricity.” Those were his exact words, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live. “They pass too much electricity.”
They were too efficient…

Yeah, so he sent me out to the local Radio Shack and told me to buy every gray coil cord they had – not the black ones, only the gray ones. And I thought, “Hhmm, this freakin’ hick from Dallas is telling me this?” I got them and ran them through my capacitance meter and found out that they added like almost .05 mfd to the signal chain. That made it sound solid – it was like having a tone control, and the brightness and harshness that the Marshalls had was eliminated. There isn’t a single picture of Hendrix… back then they already had high-end cables, but there isn’t a single picture of Hendrix where you see him playing with a straight cable. Why? This is something I brought up to Eric Johnson – whether he heard me or not I don’t know, but it could be the second coming of coil cables.

 

[bloody_sunday]

I was building amps at that point already and taking little Princeton Reverbs and converting them into CD 100’s, which is the top of the line amp that I make now. 100W inside a little Princeton-size amp is basically how Randall Smith at Mesa Boogie got started, but that’s something I didn’t know at that point, I was just doing it naturally. I started dealing with ElectroVoice because I knew the sales manager, and I’d always been a good sales promoter. I got sick of dealing with the JBL’s because they used to blow so easily, and it just wasn’t funny anymore. I got sick of changing them out, and I never really liked the harshness of them. However, the first album, Texas Flood, was all VibroVerbs and JBL’s. By the way, the thing you wrote in Rene’s interview about Stevie never getting the last Dumble we bought is absolutely true.

Back to amps…if you polled most of the amp bulletin boards for a “best amp” survey, Super Reverbs would come out on top. Stevie used them for a long time, didn’t he?
Stevie used to have Super Reverbs, but they somehow never sounded quite right to him – too much power, you know? He also used to be real superstitious about the number 6. He’d always set the controls on his amps on 6 – the treble on 6, the bass on 6, and I’d back off the knobs with a screwdriver so that when it said 6 it was really on 10 (laughs). You have to do these things.

Could Stevie really tell when his tubes were getting old by their sound?

He used to tell me that the tubes were getting tired and the transformers were getting soft. That’s just what I had to put up with.

The most amazing thing that happened to me during that entire In Step  session…let see…it wasn’t “Riviera Paradise”…by the way, that cut on the record wasn’t the best one ever recorded. The best one ever recorded was lost because the tape ran out, and I had to be the one to tell Stevie, because Steve Gaines, the producer, didn’t have the balls to tell him. We told Steve Gaines that sometimes he would do it over 4 minutes and he said, “No, no, that song is only 3 something—I know it.” We said, “You better change that reel now, because he might go longer.” Stevie played that thing like nobody ever heard and when he came out he said, “Man that was the best, wasn’t it?” I said, “I hate to tell you this, but we ran out of tape.”
By the way, that was the only time Stevie ever used a Telecaster that I know of—it was Paul Burlison’s Esquire that he had put a rhythm pickup on. Anyway, we were doing this song like “The House Is Rocking” or something—this was at Kiva Studios in Memphis, and they had 6 rooms and we filled them with 32 amps. Stevie is playing and he stops and says, “The little Gibson upstairs is making noise.” Now, he’s got cans on and I’m thinking, “How the hell is he comin’ with this?” I go upstairs, walk into one room, nothing, then the next, still nothing, and in the last room, there’s the Gibson, and sure enough, it’s cracking up.

Now, remember… Stevie is hearing all 32 amplifiers at one time. All I can say is that the Lord works in mysterious ways, and when you’re getting close to your death, you must become sanctified  or something. I don’t know. I just had to swallow my pride and say, “Well, Stevie, you can hear pretty good.”

Would you like to talk about Keith and Ron Wood for a bit?


Yeah—I worked on all of their amps for many years, fixing them up, going back to 1984. I worked on both of Keith’s solo albums, Talk Is Cheap and Main Offender.

I adore the guy. He’s like the nicest, most beautiful guy I have ever worked for. Between Stevie and him, I can die in peace. There are no 2 guys like that anywhere. Even as congenial as Clapton can be, Keith is the most hanging guy that I’ve ever met. He’ll never spend any time with the guys in the band—he’s always with the crew. Tell him that’s a really cool shirt he’s wearing, and he starts unbuttoning it. Say, “Nice watch,” and he starts to take it off. Car? He’ll hand you the keys. He’s an absolutely great guy—really  agreeable, open to whatever suggestions you may have. Woody—same thing. It’s a lot of fun being with those guys.

 

[Κουφη Λεοπαρδαλη]

Respect στον μεγαλο τζιτζικι-ο-μαχο.

 

[E7#9]

Πολύ ενδιαφέρον φίλε

Ευχαριστώ

 

[audiokostas]

Θενξ Μπλάντυ...

 

[audiokostas]

Πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα.

Απόψεις (άσχετα αν συμφωνεί κανείς ή όχι) ενός ανθρώπου που συνέβαλλε στη διαμόρφωση του ήχου των προτύπων.

Στο θέμα΄του headstock του Hendrix, αν θυμάμαι καλά, άλλη ήταν η εξήγηση του tech του. Αυτό έβρισκε, αυτό έπαιρνε, Size didn't matter....

 

[Jasemeister]

Ευχαριστούμε Σπύρο, ωραία και ενδιαφέρουσα άποψη από εναν απίστευτα έμπειρο guitar tech. Πολύ ενδιαφέροντα και τα σχόλια του SRV γενικά.

Απ'την άλλη το μόνο που με προβλημάτισε σαν αναγνώστη είναι οτι από τη μια μας λέει οτι αρχικά την "είπε" στον Stevie για τον απαράδεκτο ήχο του ενώ αργότερα με τους 30+ ενισχυτές να παίζουν ο Stevie κατάλαβε μέχρι και ποιος ενισχυτής είχε αρχίσει να σπάει ενώ ο Diaz δεν είχε καταλάβει τίποτα γενικά. Αν είχε τετοιο αυτί ο Stevie τότε περίμενε τον Diaz να του πει οτι έχει χάλια ήχο στην αρχή;

Πως σας ακούγεται εσας αυτό;

 

[Marillion]

Πολυ ενδιαφερον!!!! Ευχαριστουμε φιλε b-s!!!!

Λιγοτερο gain στο in του κουτιου καλυτερος τονος!!!!  χμ............

Προφανως κ ο SRV εξασκησε το αυτι του με τον καιρο κ μαλιστα ξεπερασε τον δασκαλο!!!! Μου θυμιζει παλια οταν επαιζα χρονια με μια κιθαρα που νομιζα πως ηταν τελεια  ωσπου.....επιασα μια καλοσεταρισμενη κ καταλαβα!!! Ζουσα τον μυθο μου!!!!

 

[bloody_sunday]

Παρακαλώ βρε παιδιά... τζάμπα είναι! ;D  Tην έχω διαβάσει εδώ και καιρό αλλά την θυμήθηκα τώρα που μιλούσαμε για καλώδια (για όσους δεν ξέρουν τι εστί Radio Shack, είναι μια μάρκα + αλυσίδα μαγαζιών με ηλεκτρονικά πάσης φύσεως στην Αμερική, και όταν λέει ότι του'πε να πάει εκεί και να αγοράσει τα φτηνά καλώδια εννοεί ότι ήθελε συγκεκριμένα αυτά της πεντάρας...)

Αυτά με το μικρό gain μέσα σε dirtboxes (ειδικά στα παραδοσιακά fuzz που ταιριάζουν περισσότερο με low output μονοπήνιους) το έχω διαπιστώσει και εγώ, για αυτό το έβαλα σε bold. Αλήθεια, έχει δοκιμάσει κάποιος το fuzz που έφτιαχνε ο Diaz, το Texas Square Face;

Απ'την άλλη το μόνο που με προβλημάτισε σαν αναγνώστη είναι οτι από τη μια μας λέει οτι αρχικά την "είπε" στον Stevie για τον απαράδεκτο ήχο του ενώ αργότερα με τους 30+ ενισχυτές να παίζουν ο Stevie κατάλαβε μέχρι και ποιος ενισχυτής είχε αρχίσει να σπάει ενώ ο Diaz δεν είχε καταλάβει τίποτα γενικά. Αν είχε τετοιο αυτί ο Stevie τότε περίμενε τον Diaz να του πει οτι έχει χάλια ήχο στην αρχή;

Εννοεί ότι δεν μπορούσε να φτιάξει τον ήχο του, πιθανότατα γιατί δεν είχε κάποιον να του τον φροντίσει. Πού να ήξερε τι να πρωτοφτιάξει; Μετασχηματιστές, headroom, μεγάφωνα, biasing, buffering, 6L6 θα πρέπει να νόμιζε ότι ήταν μάρκες από μπέρμπον... Λέει ο Diaz ότι ήταν καλός, χρυσός, αλλά ότι ουσιαστικά δεν ήξερε ούτε "πώς να πλύνει πιάτα".   Από την άλλη, μπορεί κι αυτός να ήταν υπέρ του δέοντως αυστηρός με αυτό που άκουσε...