Shut Up 'N Play Your Guitar!
Published February 19, 2003
On the Shut Up 'N Play Your Guitar CDs, Zappa's tone is surprisingly varied, but on many songs it focuses on a thick, beefy, heavily distorted sound that's always on the verge of feedback. To achieve this sound, Zappa used a variety of amps, into which he plugged in every rocker's favorite guitars, the Gibson Les Paul and the Fender Stratocaster, but each axe was heavily modified to Zappa's very demanding--and very idiosyncratic--specifications. The Les Paul (which Zappa is shown holding on the cover of the Shut Up box set) in particular featured:
an onboard preamp/EQ system that was eventually installed in nearly every guitar Frank played. "They were identical parametric filter circuits," explains ["Midget" Sloatman, Zappa's chief guitar technician in the early 1980s]. "One of the filters was set for the bass frequencies from about 5oHz to 2kHz, and the other one was set for the top end, from about 500Hz up to 20kHz." The filters had a variable resonant frequency ("q") independent from the EQ gain. "You could find a tone and get right on top of it, tweak it. and nail it," says Sloatman. The Q ranged from .7 to 10, or a very wide dynamic range to a very narrow one, and was adjustable via a 1/4" screwdriver notch on the face of the guitar. This allowed Frank to control his feedback characteristics in any hall. He could basically tune his guitar to the room, find out how the room responded to the amplifier, and dial it up so he could have maximum control of the feedback. That was the whole point behind the equalizers. But Frank also played a lot with his left hand, and in order to hear the nuances-the string presence-he'd have to bring the treble up, which is another thing he liked about the filters. He could pick high frequencies anywhere from 4k to 8k and bring out the nuances of the strings, so you could hear what his fingers were doing, even if he wasn't picking every note."Other tunes featured a very different sound. Return of's "Pink Napkins" features a surprisingly clean, jazzy and phased tone. And Return of the Son of, the third album in the trilogy also has an usual tone on its final song-which sounds like an acoustic guitar run through a minefield of effects pedals.The Seymour Duncan humbuckers in Frank's Les Paul could be switched between single-coil, humbucking, or single-coil out-of-phase settings, and a toggle switch controlled whether the pickups were wired in series or parallel. A 9-position wafer switch afforded all the possible combinations.
Zappa was also not afraid to experiment with effects boxes. "Ship Ahoy" on Son Of sounds like a cross between a guitar and a sequenced synthesizer-because it is: Zappa ran his Les Paul through an early MuTron processor, to obtain the sound.
- Shut Up 'N Play Your Guitar!
- Published: February 19, 2003
- Type:
- Section: Music
- Filed Under: Music: Classic Rock and Oldies, Music: Rock
- Writer: Ed Driscoll
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Hi Brian! Yes, Ed, another excellent one, thanks.
This prompted me to bring the Rykodisc set into work this a.m. (currently playing in the background, "Treacherous Cretins"). A great piece - even if I am too sonically pig-ignorant to make heads or tails of talk about "parametric filter circuits."
Bill,
Sorry if I got too technical--I think I was hoping that readers would at least get some sense that Zappa wasn't just a "plug it in and turn it up to 11" kind of player. As I understand it, a big part of his use of EQ was to "tune" the guitar's sound to the acoustics of the room he was playing in, so that he could be right on the verge of feedback, without having a sound that's so distorted, it would be mud.
Ed
No need to apologize for my denseness. Your piece accomplished what it set out to do: get me reconsidering and playing Zappa's music. And as you note, it also established that the man was no dolt (something fans of the later "dirty panty" songs don't always recognize) when it came to his sound.
for more information it's worth checking out The Real Frank Zappa book. the guy was obviously pretty smart. very funny too.
i loved his ideas about music.
i just got into zappa 3-4 months ago,i like stuff from iron maiden too wishbone ash-pentangle-king crimson-ufo etc.my friend mike had two or three zappa albums and i "liked them" he moved out(would rather get fucked up?)so i bought freak out!after that my friend jason moved in.he had overnite sensation/(')/jab-from l.a. and an awsome album called sleep dirt(wow!!!)i'm 10 albums short of all of his 60's-70's lp's!!!my favorites (right now) are hot rats-waka/jawaka-the grand wazoo-one size fits all and sleep dirt.my favorite song(forever)is black napkins(makes me want to cry and cringe.i just sent away for the shut up 'n playyer guitar series!!!and the albums i'm missing(i love tax time!!!)i can't describe my love for zappa and his music other than he's swell!! thanks for reading this.feedback is goog!bye
The Shut Up discs are about the only Zappa I can listen to. Most of his lyrics remind me of the fake advertisement tapes me and a friend used to make in junior high. Fake ads for jock itch medicine and zit cream. That kind of stuff. His lyrics just remind me too much of junior high bathroom humor. The kind of jokes guys at that age tell because their embarassed when they get a hard on in class, or they just start to notice that their getting B.O. or the girl down the street started wearing a training bra. Anyway, that's what his lyrics remind me of. But I absolutely love his guitar playing. I wish there were more in the Shut up series. I also love Inca Roads from You can't play that on stage any more. I love his long guitar solo work. It transports me.
eiiii:D
great music:D
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Nice piece of work, Ed! Great music that desrves to be highlighted.