And it just had this most insane buzz, it just would kind of stir your brain right up. I asked him if he could take it out, so he took the thing apart and took out was this tiny little box and we started using that for some of the overdrive. “The engineer at the studio, Mark Richardson, had a weird lap steel guitar that had this little button you could flick, and it was a distortion unit. “Billy Corgan is a pretty badass guitar player – he’s really, really talented, and he also always had a really good understanding, sonically, of what he was going for.”Įven so, both Corgan and Vig kept themselves open to new ideas, and when one presented itself by accident, seized upon it. It was time-consuming, but I think the record sounds really good as a result because it does sound really big, but very focused.
#BUTCH VIG VOCALS ALTERNATIVES HOW TO#
So we got really good at figuring out how to find frequencies in a particular guitar track and blend that with another frequency. You can’t just start piling one on top of the other, 10 guitar tracks with the same tone, it’s just going to sound like mud. And we had to be really focused when we were layering all those, to make sure that each sound fit in with the other layers. I mean, a song like Hummer, at some point, probably had 50 or 60 guitar parts on it. “ Siamese Dream is probably the album I have recorded the most guitars on. Not that Vig stops at double-tracking, taking things to the ultimate when working with Billy Corgan on Smashing Pumpkins’ second album… But again it puts the guitar out in the corners so it leaves room up the middle for the vocals and snare drum, or piano riff, or whatever.” If there wasn’t a double then sometimes I’ll pan it left, then run it through a delay set at just 20 or 30 milliseconds, so it separates it just enough that it feels like a left/right.
The same thing with recording acoustic, whenever I do that I always double it.
“I do like to double-track guitars, especially clean ones, because I like to get them very tight and then pan them left and right for a widescreen sound that leaves the middle open for vocals and other lead instruments.