Soul Power

Dopo aver speso preziose giornate a fantasticare su di uno scontro tra bambole, Kerry Brown è finalmente tornato a servire la comunità di fan degli Smashing Pumpkins con un interessante-ma-forse-anche-no raccolta di informazioni su Soul. O sull’anima. O su di un particolare amplificatore che ha ben servito alla causa di Corgan durante le registrazioni di Gish e Siamese Dream, tra il 1990 e il 1993. E’ lui, secondo i protagonisti dell’inchiesta, il principale responsabile di “quel” suono della chitarra, quello che ha appiccicato il sound del gruppo ai cuoricini da adolescenti tenerelli di un pezzo di generazione. Uno stralcio degno di nota:

Billy Corgan: When I first bought the amp in 1989 from this stoner guy, I thought it sounded ok but I think I was more excited to just be playing thru a Marshall. I realized after a time that I wasn’t that crazy about the sound so I asked Mike to look at it and see what he could do. After he changed the tubes to the KT88s the amp just sprang to life, and it was the body of the amp that I used to drive insane amounts of distortion into to get ‘that sound’. Butch Vig and I were so sold on the sound of the amp that outside of a few select parts, I would say that 98pct of all guitar parts on the first two albums were done thru this amp/speaker combo. In order to change the sound, the Stratocaster parts would be recorded through a shure 57 on the bottom right speaker, and the Les Paul parts would be recorded through a Sennheiser 421 on the top left speaker. This subtle difference between what speaker we would use created the sense of playing thru a different amp set-up even though obviously I wasn’t.