Sixty Seconds With The Danelectro Tuna Melt Tremolo Stompbox
I have been battering around six-stringed instruments for my own evil purposes for years, but as far as knowing how to play? Well, let's just say it's a lost cause. But I do know how to make the experimental and oddball noises I need in the proud tradition of groups such as Wire, one of my all-time top-10 favorites in terms of groups that get great, left-of center uses out of guitars.
To be honest, the first time I played it, the more left-of-center results sounded a lot more far-out than on the second attempt you'll see and hear in this clip, but I did enjoy the Wire-esque results on one long passage in the vid. Many of the sounds won't surprise experienced, "normal" guitar players, and the "People Are Strange" tremolo effect is always fun to play, but I prefer the more dorked up hyperactive setting heard in the last part of the demo.
The results of my sonic torture of a Gibson run thru the Tuna Melt and into the Valve King 212? Well, see and hear for yourself. They won't be calling me in to do any session work for Steely Dan, but if Throbbing Gristle ever does a reunion, I'm a shoo-in.
This is all quite experimental, and I am indeed using you dear Gearwire readers (and viewers) as my personal guinea pigs as I sort through a variety of video experiments to see if anything catches on with you. So why not do me a favor and drop some feedback in the Gearwire Forums about these things? And don't bother telling me I'm a crap guitarist, we know THAT already.
Any volunteers to do weird noises on my next video, step right up. Or better yet, why not make your own and send them to Gearwire? Drop a line in the forums and ask me how to proceed on THAT one.
JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com. This is my video blog and this is the great Danelectro Tuna Melt Experiment that I talked about in the print version of my Gearwire Gossip column just a little while ago, and the first video I shot with this was just horribly, horribly dorked up, so we're going to take another crack at it. This is a sort of a retro tremolo type thing, but I like doing things wrong and just really mucking about with the settings to make the weirdest, most spacey sound I can get out of a stompbox or a synth or just whatever it is so I like making really weird bizarre noises. I'm not what you call a technically precise or accomplished guitar player. I just like to make some noise, and who doesn't want to pull a stompbox right out of the box and just start tearing stuff up?
And for our little video today, playing the Gibson Les Paul Custom. Yeah check a look at that, take it with that. Yeah.
[JOE WALLACE MESSING AROUND WITH A GIBSON LES PAUL CUSTOM AND A DANELECTRO TUNA MELT]
That's it, the Danelectro Tuna Melt. You can get everything from normal tremolo to all kinds of spacy weird sounds out of it, depending partially on how you play of course, but I like to play things wrong so naturally I get wrong sounds out of whatever I touch. We will be doing some more Danelectro stuff because there's all kinds of loveliness from Danelectro and I want to try and mutate each and every one of their pedals into something that's uniquely weird like me. I'm Joe Wallace. This is another edition of my video blog for Gearwire.Com.
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