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Friday, September 11, 2015

REM "End Of The World" Isolated Guitars

REM End of the World isolated guitar track image
During the 80s and 90s, R.E.M. was one of the most popular and influential bands to come out of the U.S. In this week's isolated track, we'll listen to the isolated guitar from one of the band's most beloved songs "It's The End Of The World As We Know It."

The song is from the R.E.M.'s 1987 Document album, which spent 33 weeks on the Billboard Hot 200 album chart, peaking at #10. Here's what to listen for.

1. Peter Buck has a different guitar sound in every section, with a relatively clean electric on the verse, a bigger distorted one on the B sections and choruses, and another on the last part of the chorus and the bridge. An acoustic guitar enters on the next to last chorus and the very last chord of the song.

2. The guitar goes from mono in the verses and bridge to doubled in B sections and chorus. The acoustic guitar also leans to the left a little.

3. The playing is not perfect, but the timing is. It keeps that indie feel and stops the song from feeling too slick.

4. Listen to the hard mute at 2:28. You can hear a brief click of the beginning of next chord being cut off, something that would be easy to fix today in a DAW, but not so easy in the console/tape days.




3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a class a amp doesn't it? Like a vox ac15 just cranked!! I've never heard Marshall have that sort of chime and definition on semi clean settings... What does it sound like to you bobby?

Unknown said...

Wow! I would never think that such different sounding guitars would work together so nicely.
They are so distinct from each other from section to section,
my gut would say the difference be too jarring but when you hear them in context, they work great.
Very cool.

joe said...

The guitars especially the doubled guitars sound REALLY phasey! I wonder if they were multi mic'd. I'm be thinking these need to be phase aligned.

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