Amateur Mistakes Pros Don’t Make (Tim Pierce)

hey everybody i'm out here in los angeles for the namm show for the weekend i just did an interview with my dear friend tim pierce this is one of the best ones that tim and i have ever done together should definitely check it out and i want to remind you if you haven't subscribed my channel i'm 25 000 away from 3 million hit that subscribe button i know a lot of you think you're subscribed but you're actually not so do it now here's my interview with tim i'm here with tim pierce in his castle his recording studio the recording capital of tarzana california tarzana california yeah tarzana bakersfield nashville paris london we all know this so tim um we're both holding guitars here but we're holding guitars because uh as props right now but tim will play here in a little bit yes i will but we don't know what we're going to talk about today this is like we're kind of like are seinfeld right it's like this is about we don't make videos about nothing essentially but i always am cracking up because tim always cracks me up and i just love to ask tim questions about about everything one of my favorite questions to ask tim is when he would do sessions which he doesn't do that many sessions anymore i'd always call him and say did you make any mistakes knowing that the answer was always no tim doesn't make mistakes no you need to be invincible if you're a studio player although guitar players they wanted to hire guitar players to be adventurous too so you could you could you know push it a little bit and make a mistake now but generally the thing that you do is you you do everything perfect the first okay so so historically session players though how many to be a session player how many mistakes could you get away with at a session well the idea when you show up and they have they're paying you to do this and everybody's everybody's laughing and having a good time and everything seems so easy and fun until you hit record the first take there's an ex exactly the expectation on the first take that it's going to sound amazing right and drums and bass are pretty much first take instruments guitar is a little tougher because you have different sounds that you might be reaching for or whatever but when you throw down something on the first take it has to inspire confidence oh we we're gonna get this do you freak out a little bit though when you're doing like at first i know i did tim's kind of a can be a little neurotic i mean that's that's i think that goes with being a perfectionist though you only get to be as good as you are by being a perfectionist now people accuse me of being a perfectionist i am far from being a perfectionist but tim does not like to make mistakes and if you go back historically i i'm always one to go back to the 70s and i've always been fascinated with session guitar this is why i i've been following tim since long before i knew him i followed his career from youtube basically one of the reasons that i got on youtube was because i saw tim on youtube and i said okay well there are pro guitar players like tim but the uh going back to the 70s and the guys that came up in the generation before you the larry carlton's the people like jay greytons yeah these people when they would come in they would play these things flawlessly for the most part right well yeah i mean there's a code in the studio that you had to be ready you had to be bulletproof you had to be ready for it and some people weren't ready in fact larry carlton used that phrase he's not ready yet when somebody would show up and not quite be able to throw down and i was lucky because when i got here in 1980 all of that had kind of peaked and you could be more quirky you could be rough around the edges you could be more of a player is it because because people would spend more time making records was that part of it the style had changed a little bit it became more rock oriented than than khan of the previous period which was a little more muso oriented i would have to say yeah and then in the 90s it really got sweet for me because when nirvana showed up uh then the guy who could sound like he was in the band was what who they wanted and that's who i was i was the guy who could sound like i was in the band and i was a band player but i had the chops to get it done quick and to adapt and you had the chops to to play the parts with no mistakes that's just part of that they weren't out of tune yeah and the the guitars there's countless records where the guitar players think that they played on the record tim right well it's true and a lot of times the drummer would often get fired in the early days you remember this because the drums had to be just until until beat detective yeah yeah beat detective is the thing i always complain about that that started around 2000 yeah where in pro tools you could fix drummer's performances so you didn't have to fire the drummer because typically the session would go the drummer would come in and this is before i was even a producer drummer would come into the session they couldn't cut it they'd they'd do one day of recording the producer would bring in a session drummer and the drummer would quit that's right and then the band would have to find a new drummer after the record was made right this is very common yeah you could do better than that i had a drummer friend who would make friends with the bad drummer and so he could sit there and watch the thing happen and even kenny ironoff's story originally about how he got back into melon cap's band was that he got fired and he came back and watched whoever they hired do it so that that's kind of the way to solve it is to make everybody part of the family even though it's very hard for the drummer but if the drummer in the band quits and gets mad there's nothing you can do okay let's talk about not making mistakes though tim so the the focus and we've never really talked about this about uh not buzzing notes it's not just coming up with the right parts it's everything ringing together if you have an open string if you're playing on the b string and you have an open e string under it there's no spot where there's a muted note by accident or anything you have to be how do you develop this the focus to do that i think it's by constant repetition and i was lucky that when i got here i started doing demo after demo after demo and then record after record when i wasn't doing records i would go back and do demos and i honed my skills and in the late 80s i did publishing demos like excessively like sometimes three songs a day and i got better at coming up with parts and sounds instantly and immediately but the idea is it has to sound like a record there's a big distance in sounding like you're doing something cool and having it sound like it's a record right that's where all that goes with the precision of the pocket that's right the pocket the ev everything tuned into in time in time and then parts that are hooks right that serve the song and that are interesting but stay out of the way the vocal all this stuff is extrapolating in your mind and you're coming up with stuff that's sensitive to everybody but but then you want to be able to be powerful too i mean you have to be strong you have to be sensitive it has to fit the sounds have to change right the touch has to be right the pocket has to be right it has to be perfectly in tune wow when i interviewed steve lukather he said people expected you to come in and just create the arrangements for them that's totally true that's at a certain point you know there wer there was an era where people would bring in charts and the studio players would play the charts that were written by brilliant arrangers and then they would deviate but they actually were playing little percolating parts there'd be three guitar players all reading three different parts you hear that on motown stuff yes yeah yeah but then it changed and the studio musician became the that was the tommy tedesco error right there that first era town two i mean you know yeah and the 60s and for a great part of the 70s right and you would play the part and maybe you would make it better but you would actually play the written part and the arrangers were brilliant and they would create these really cool things but there was a point and it was the 80s when you the band arranged everything right then and there yeah and that's the nashville tradition too it's always has that always been the nashville tradition absolutely yeah because they're they're reading number charts so they're actually you know what i would say using parts i even heard this in nashville you take the heat in the second verse you know you take the heat in the second version what does that mean it means you you're the guy who steps out in the second verse you know you take the heat now i've never heard this term ever until right now you take the heat i haven't thought of it till right now so so the the need to be an arranger the producer basically is relying on the session guys to come up with the parts let's be let's be real about this it's it's absolutely true i mean everybody works together i did a rob thomas record with matt zerlitic and that's the first time i met tom buchevack and i remember i would work with mats or atlantic and think why is matt so earnest all the time he's just so earnest all the time and that book of acts shows up on the session i'm working with tom which is another amazing thing and certainly is just laughing the whole time i've never seen this and i realize it's because bucavec is like coming up with all the beautiful you know the core of the arrangement you know and not to take away from matt because everybody participates right but it's shared well thomas from the is a nashville guitar player and he's used to doing that this is this is what you do in nashville yes yeah yeah but he's particularly brilliant at it but what i realized oh it's not that matt's being earnest it's that i'm too serious and i'm working too hard right and they're just playing and it was but it's exactly what you're talking about the arrange tom's a great arranger on the session he's a great arranger and so i mean it was it was a perfect example of the band doing the arranging but that doesn't take away from producers because no as a producer you need to step away the producers making decisions on performances exactly and then come back in or and you can let the band play and then later i mean like dan huff would do that he would let the band play yeah and then later he would start honing other guitar parts because he's an excellent guitar but that's you let the band do their thing let everybody rise in the way they want to rise and be naturally you know creative let's get back to the precision part of playing of what you do talk about fretting notes let's talk about some things that we really never talk about about where do you put your fingers to make sure that you get the clearest sound okay it has to be right behind the fret and you can't press too hard i mean the best touch is the lightest touch the touch that does just enough pressure to get the job done and nothing more and in fact great guitar players almost look like they're not doing anything right like like like i kind of hit a little too hard and i move my hands a little too much but really great guitar players their hands barely lift off the neck and the the over rings are really important like keyboard players it's so easy to get things to ring because you're using a sustain pedal right same thing on guitar a capo is a really great thing in a session for helping with that because these open chords are still the best choices right no matter what key you're in yeah so if you're doing a session and the song isn't d flat you tune down a half step and you get the cowboy that's right or if it's in b flat maybe you put a capo here maybe you put a capo here yeah you get all the open chords nobody sees that capo right but it's that's one thing but you're talking about fretting it's really the lightest touch and just behind the fret i always tell people this stuff when i would teach people play just behind the fret put use just enough pressure to press the string down you don't want to be gripping it too hard because you'll throw the guitar out of tune okay now here's the other thing that i just saw you do that people don't talk about you're playing an a note right there right is that an a okay your third finger not only is it hitting that a note but the edge of it is muting the string next to it that's right i always do that i'm always muting every string that i'm not playing i am muted exactly this is the biggest thing and i talk about it over and over and over and if you're a studio player this stuff is instinctive yes every piece of flesh on this hand is muting all the strings except the one you're using yeah and really this the tip of this is always touching the next string and look at me the the second one is too just yeah just to make sure exactly just to make sure you did it right there and i do things where i will play and i will even mute on with the palm of my right hand just to make sure absolutely always that the notes are not ringing it's it's triple quadruple muting yeah that happens you only want to have that one note or two whatever only the ones that are being that are meant to be played are the ones that are not being muted yep and then you have to keep your fingers round enough to where any string that you want to have ring rings so there are so many you have to be really focused on the precision and have a level of concentration and this is what you're incredibly good at tim is your your focus well i learned on the job and you really you know they're they're people who could focus better than me for sure but by you know you come to a city like this and i've always said the competition is not local it's not regional it's not national it's international so the best keyboard player from paris moves here and the best guitar player from russia moves or whatever you know wow the best you know ilia in nashville i i don't know i think he's still talking yeah he's shinsky yeah he's from russia and he's phenomenal and he moved to nashville right and so everybody the best musicians move to these cities now now i would say it's nashville it's not la anymore yeah it's nashville the best people in the world move to a particular city so you end up rising to that level i never rose to the level of some of these guys that i idolized but i got part of the way there and so you just that's the natural that's the great thing about it when you're in an environment you know i got to sit next to steve lucas or dan huff michael thompson tom buchovack i got to sit next to all these great players and so when you're sitting next to them you go oh i can't kid myself i see it right there they've got this incredible you know my skills might be this tim you're very humble well you're very honest but you you see that i have incredible skills the interesting thing is you on your channel you play a lot of lead guitar but you really didn't do a lot of lead guitar playing on records because there wasn't and the era that you grew up that there became less and less and less and eventually no well it's even when i first moved here i didn't know how to play rhythm guitar because all i cared about was sewing when i started at 12 i moved here at at age 20 and it was like oh rhythm i forgot rhythm guitar what are those chords i learned on the job basically and i got better every year i got a little better at it and uh especially with it's funny with r b guitar spent the entire uh decade of the 90s trying to get that really smooth r b thing yeah and by the time i had it it kind of went out of fashion tim let's talk about i can still do it let's talk about practicing with with uh because we don't talk about this that much playing with a with a drum machine or playing with a real drummer and and the difference in your pocket when you're actually playing with a drummer if you're playing with vinnie caliuta versus playing with a program drum part what is the difference and why do you need to be able to do both well the thing about drummers is you may not realize is that they all have radically different feels and styles and like every like matt chamberlain has this whole different thing aaron sterling has this whole different thing then he has this whole different thing it's incredibly different the way they do everything and that astounds me because you would think drums is it they can sound similar maybe when you hear them on records it's not that way at all right these guys have a signature that's totally personal and what happened was when i came up i moved here in 1980 the emphasis was always lay back play behind the beat so everybody learned to pull back pull back you know like brian adams drummer everybody's drummer that was great was way behind right right way behind and then when the computer showed up then it all shifted to right on the grid right and so then you have someone like josh freeze who is absolutely on the grid well everybody learned to play on the grid i got fired from one session because the producer said you know we're not going to get this you're just not playing you're playing too far back i went what i spent my whole life trying to have a good feel and everybody told me was behind the beat and so everything shifted so i gradually learned to bring it forward and play on the grid and so that changed but now you you really want to be able to do both right and what are the things that you're keying in on when you're when you come in with a drummer a a matt chamberlain versus vinnie cal uta versus greg bissonnette versus whoever they all have their different feels with where they play the snare where they play the kick drum what are you locking into uh the way i put it is this first of all you don't want to be too loud you want to basically be inside the drum kit you want to be between the hi-hat and the snare you want to be between the bass drum and the kick drum and the snare you want to be interlocked in the middle you want to be in the middle of the kit with your rhythm bar yeah and if you're that and you really can't be too you got to get just the right level for that so that you become like a piece of percussion in the drum kit that's how i look at it right and if you do that it's it's amazing it's amazing okay so i'm gonna shift gears here a little bit so you and i talk about gear a lot i i don't even do sessions anymore and i rarely do videos on recording but i'm but it's really my favorite thing i love to record i mean i really do it's one of my passions that's why i do my what makes the sun great series it's not just the analyzing the songs it's the actual production because that's really a production series disguised as music appreciation and and uh music theory maybe but it's really a music production concept that i have you and i talk about finding different types of speakers for example and we're always on the quest for this stuff even if we're not playing sessions because because of why though why do we like this so much tim it takes a lifetime to get good at something i heard this quote the other day they were asking public assaults why he still practiced four hours a day in his 90s he said i'm noticing some improvements that's how i feel right it's like i i you know it took me a long time to get here and now i'm still learning and i'm learning some stuff better than i ever have but you're learning stuff about about sound totally right and i was too honestly i was too busy yeah and i was collecting all kinds of stuff that was right for the time you know the ultimate ac 30 the ultimate fender jaguar you know the ultimate rack whatever you know we were all chasing the stuff we had to chase in the moment but now it's kind of up to me and so i've been obsessed with vintage celestian speakers and over the last two years i've bought two and i talk about this stuff all the time all the time i'm obsessed with vintage celestion speakers as well yeah and you confirmed something to me i was going what about these 65 watt and you said you got to get them you know what is it the 65-watt celestion that was just made from 78 to 80. yeah like 79.80 yeah yeah they were the producer's favorite early gc 800 cabinets and i heard about them somebody mentioned them and i said rick what do you think about these you got to get them you got to get them you got it so i went out and got some and lo and behold they're like a high fidelity version of the old selections that i've been using so they they serve a great purpose some of the time and somehow the old selections they sound so warm and so musical now i have another thing that i discovered a friend of mine he sold me some re-coned old selections we toned with the really good kits okay you know in the right way yep oh my they sound amazing tighter so uh you know because because the they actually become loose the sound yeah yeah and that's good for some things i mean phil x talks about this about how a vintage amp you have to actually play different because it doesn't doesn't respond as quickly right to a modern high gain amp and i'm going yeah that's so true you actually adapt your playing to every instrument like this instrument i'm going to play it differently than when i play that instrument every instrument changes the way you play consequently every piece of gear you use to make every sound changes the part you come up with it literally changes the music that you make i'm always asking tim when he's tim will make a video you don't do a lot of gear videos but every time he does a gear video i buy something that he uses i just do there's a pedal like what is this pedal or i'll call tim and tim's like oh i've got 14 of those like the nobles tim why do you have however many of those that you have well part of it is it's a little bit of an obsession when you find the right pedal i like the odr ones that i have now this is a great story because once again tom buback is very generous and he brought john shanks i think an odr one nobles he apparently bought a box of this is an overdrive it's an overdrive he gave him to all his friends a number of years ago he bought a a an os box of these now think about a guitar player being so secure about what he does he goes i found the greatest thing that works great for me i'm going to share with everybody else i mean that's pretty generous so he gave shanks one and shanks gave me one i ended up using it for the rest of my life basically the early 90s but tim how many do you own of them i think at this point i own a few i bought one from tim yeah he asked me about the pedal i said i'll give you the one i was using in the video you know it's like it's that's fun to do if something is rare and valuable you feel like you would like to have a few of them for a while and then you just in case something happens and part of this is is i've given a couple of those odr ones away the reason i have so many is i found someone in in the uk who had bought 30 new old stock odr ones in spain and he contacted me and i said okay i'll take this many of them and you know they do go up in value so i remember three years ago i finally found out about the most tortion very late yep and uh i bought i think the last remaining five in the world that weren't completely torn up tim's buying them so that other people can't get them i'm just kidding and but now they've been cloned i'm all for everything being available to everybody so now the most original has been cloned by our friend greg drummond with the karma pedal and that's right also by the people and i got the i got the karma pedal well this is exactly what you talked about you saw it in my video i did i you contacted greg you bought the karma from him that's right i am all for i don't want any of this exclusivity i want everybody to have everything it just there are certain components that don't exist anymore and they try and clone them and you can't quite do it and that it's nobody's fault but there is a pedal the shanks vermiran ods one is a probably the closest thing i've heard so far that captures the sound of an early 90s why tim why do i buy these why do i even when i'm not even doing sessions anymore why do i still want these things is it is it that it just never kind of leaves your head that you're always a producer yeah i think we're falling more in love with the things we loved originally i've noticed one thing about myself at this point in time i was too busy to take the time to appreciate this stuff and now i have more time to do my own thing with these petals and i think you're falling in love with guitars even more than you used to not even not just guitars drums when i interviewed bernard purdy last week and and i asked him about how he would mute his toms dead in his drums you know what kind of tape you would use use gaff tape you use paper towels things like that and i i've done a million drum sessions i always tune the drums i always got the sounds and i just love that and i'm not really a drummer but i'm obsessed with drum sounds i just bought a new snare two weeks ago for the sessions that i'm not going to do but i just wanted i bought a new keplinger snare and it sounds phenomenal but consider this you if you like i keep telling people that i get to be an artist on youtube and whether they believe me or not that's their business but i get to be an artist on youtube so the stuff that i use reaches more people now than it did in some ways when i was using it on big records because i was anonymous now it's me now if i use a piece of gear and i make up i write my own songs on youtube if i use a piece of gear on youtube i'm reaching people with the sound i'm making as an artist in a greater measure than i ever did before and i would argue that point with you when you sit a park amp behind you you get that sound you're doing some song with some pedal you're reaching more people so why is it less of an experience for you now why is it that's right it's more valuable right because it's you it's your channel and your audience and it's a direct connection so i would say that's it and also i think you fall more in love when you're older you just appreciate stuff even more right i mean i just i'm falling in love with all of these instruments even more than i ever have and now it's now i have time i'm not busy running off to a session trying to get some something that sounds like the latest kelly clarkson record or the latest you know whatever record you know depending on what era uh i can actually make the sounds i want for me and my audience one of the smartest things i ever did in a session was right it was in 2000 when i was first starting to engineer my own sessions because in the first couple years as a producer i had an engineer i worked with so i remember i was doing my first drum session and my buddy billy who had been doing my recording for me billy hume uh said listen you go get the dre you know you know what you're doing get the drum sounds up i'll come by the studio and i'll check to make sure everything is good he comes by the studio says perfect everything's in phase everything is great and everything so i started the session and i think in my i'm i'm getting the drummers and i was like you know the snare doesn't sound good this guy's snare just doesn't sound really sound good so i say to my assistant can gl that you guys have seen in my videos before i was like i'm going to go to the guitar center i'm going to buy a snare what i was like yeah i'm not going to have this thing ruined by this crappy snare sound snare sound is everything this is really before sample replacement was i mean he had sample replacement but wasn't wasn't easy to do then it wasn't as easy so i go down and i pick out a great snare and i paid whatever 400 bucks for it or so and i come back to the studio we put up the snare and instantly great sounding recording the having a great snare and investing the money in that made me realize that as a producer the only i'm in charge of how the record sounds the better the record sounds the more work i get and the better records i get and then i started collecting things not just snare drums entire drum sets symbols guitar amps guitars bass amps basses i used every combination of drum heads i could to experiment and i learned all these different things how to tune drums what type of combinations of guitar amps work together what type what combinations of guitars work together to me this is one of the most fun things i ever did is actually learning about all these instruments so when i interviewed bernard berdy and i asked him about these things or i interviewed ron carter and i asked him how did you mike the bases i'm asking him as a producer then and as a historian um how did you do things back in those days now there is knowledge that you have tim of doing sessions from the time you began as a session player that is probably lost at this point unless you you know that you don't really talk about things that you were doing in sessions let's say back in 1983 what was your setup what was the tim peer setup at the time this is so great because like you're saying producers had you have to have this global view of everything because you're responsible for everything and that includes the drums i have producer friends who built outrageous guitar arsenals and then they would hire somebody like ross the drum doctor to come in with all the snares and stuff and then the drummer wouldn't have to if it was the band drummer you'd have a specialist with the collection of drums who would come and there were several of these guys you know they bring in their drums tune the drums change the heads too exactly and you would that guy would be sitting there the whole time so you never have to worry yeah then if it was somebody like vinnie or kenny aaron they would bring their collection of trump so somebody had a drum collection you're in atlanta you had your own if you're like brendan o'brien you buy everything because you want everything but you know rob cavallo had bass stamps he has an amazing ham at oregon everybody who produces records wants to have all the stuff ready so that's why i have so much gear in my studio exactly exactly but you you ask about the 80s yeah and it was amazing because there wasn't that much available right and there was nobody making uh there were no there were only stock apps so like jay graydon well get in talk about what were the stock amps well there were only two things you really like one the first time i worked with lukather was in the early 80s it was at sunset sound with al schmidt yeah on this record a friend of mine david garfield had this band called charisma he hired all these great musicians to come in and play on his kind of you know muzo record right right so i got to be in the studio with steve lucather when i was you know 24 years old it was awesome and at that time it was the time of him playing on dirty laundry and all these other things he would show up with a pair of marshalls and a pair of fender deluxes that's all there was right and in my case when i went to new york to do john wade and bon jovi and or even here what you did is you brought your marshals the producer had their marshals the engineer had their marshals you got the marshals from your friends and you would look at eight marshals and find the marshall that worked right for the part right and he used that one right and then maybe you try another one for a different part and then there were these guys who would make them into high gain mo you know they would like jose and mike morin and that's right those didn't always sound that good but you know you kept trying that stuff and then paul rivera modded the defenders to me that's right to give you a lead tone you'd have to push the fender with a rivera mod right that's right and distort that much either that's right so to simplify your question there were fender deluxes and marshall 100 watts basically that was what you used and you got all the sounds out of that that's why luca that's what he had and then he started to build his rack and he would use the rack in front of those things you know we just buy all the rack stuff initially and he would use it in front so the deluxes were for clean stuff you know like i keep forgetting by michael mcdonald i would assume you know in the ddl you can kind of hear it right yeah and then the marshals were for the rock stuff and just switching i have owned probably just jcm800s for example i probably owned that's what we use 30 of them maybe i used to get them new out of the box one after the other they sounded amazing in the 80s yeah that's right and i i think i own the earliest i think i own three right now still i own a couple plexis i own uh uh you know jmps at least two or three jmps and they're all different they all they're totally different if you're kidding they're all completely different ambulatory i've gone back to plexis because my first marshal changed my life when i was 19. yep and so that's where i'm back to with my marshalls now i have other boutique amps and stuff and you know we both love the parks yes i have amps that simulate other amps but the marshals i love now are the plexis i just because it's i can hear that 60s 70s edge of breakup thing okay so tim we've been talking and holding guitars let's actually have you plug in some sounds for a minute and let's just hear some of these things that we've been talking about sounds great okay tim what are you playing through here this is a very special thing it's a 1967 pa head and i got this from paul reed smith apparently he had traded it back and forth with eric johnson for a while nice and it sounds so amazing channel two it's got four channels channel two sounds amazing and it's it's kind of like edible the way it sounds i mean all you have to do is play with the volumes on the guitar and and here you get every tone what a beautiful clean tone right [Music] [Applause] [Music] i mean you can still hear every note turn the guitar down [Music] i'm just in love with it now the speakers i'm using right now several 412s down there okay and this particular 412 i'm using one vintage celestion okay okay let me find the one it's right here yep you've got these uh neve bae neve stuff yeah knee clones which i love yeah and the reason i like them is because the output this is how i control the volume into pro tools so these output knobs are not stepped they're you know it's a smooth glide so i use these for the actual input level and i'm blending two microphones so you'll be interested in this this is a 1971 greenback pre-roll of greenback okay okay uh and it's blended with that speaker we were talking about which is the 65 watt from 1978 and that's going through a c800 sony which is the modern version of the c37 it's not the c800 with the heatsink this is a mic that is very hard to find it wasn't popular it's just a black microphone that sounds pretty hi-fi so in lieu of using a royer which everybody uses i'm using this sony it's on the high fidelity speaker getting a more hi-fi sound a more kind of you know 360 sound and then the 57 is giving me the mid-range fist let's hear the two mics individually here is the 57 it's given all the bite and the upper mids the c800 through these uh 65 watt good level i mean that by itself pleases me but you can see when i blend in the 57 it becomes even better as you get a little of that mid-range fist so let me get them both in more is more there we go well now i'm peaking pro tools why is louder always better just honestly because it is yeah so okay so let me turn them down a little bit because i've kind of gone a little too far i use the stock pro tools noise gate on everything yeah here let me put up the gate really quick and a bit lately i've been liking echo boy jr because it just gives a little bit of a shadow and the trick for me with delays is i roll all the top end off and i have a little modulation so you barely notice it's there it just makes the guitar have dimension okay now at least i'm not peeking red so that's good i mean just bleed in as much distortion as you i mean i go back to you know the 60s with this thing just makes me so happy anyway i've gone past the noise gate on this and there are other amps that are quieter that's one thing about a plexi marshall the noise floor is loud let's talk about the plexi that's right below this time what is that a 1968 super tremolo a friend of mine owned this amp for 50 years and he wanted me to buy it this is a guy i used to play rock with and party with in the early 80s a really dear old friend of mine he moved up to redding california for a long time he actually managed waylon jennings studio really nice musician anyway he kept it for 50 years i bought it from a bunch of great conditions yeah it's it's it's so cool and i got the cabinets with it too so it's a really wonderful thing and a meaningful meaningful thing i mean okay okay tim so since we were talking about your amps what are the other amps that are behind you you don't talk about these things that often okay this is my ac 30 substitute right here 30s or is that a no which one is that it's a matchless clubman my favorite match is it runs hotter than the others and it's really simple to me it sounds like the ultimate ac30 this is a real one from the early days of matchless mark sampson days yeah early early days they sound good today too i know the the phil who runs matchless the new ones are faithfully good to this too but this is an ac30 this is from an engineer friend of mine this is a one-off from my friend howard willing it's just a custom mav that i kind of fell in love with very very high gain the high watt a super big super clean great for pedals they're known as the ultimate pedal platform now this is an ac30 production model ac30 that sounds amazing it's a new one it's a new one i recommend the stock ac30 head that you can buy anywhere if you want an ac 30 head it sounds great yeah that's just a head though that's just the head because i i always liked separating the head so that i could get to the knobs quickly yep okay now here is the amp is most of the time it's divided by 13 rsa 23. okay designed by rusty anderson who plays with paul mccartney rusty's an amazing guitar player very versatile session guitar player a lot of people don't know that okay he designed he spent years designing this with fred tacone and it's my favorite hat rsa 23 it's like a cross between a fender and a box and a marshall i mean it's if i go do a session i have one of these downstairs in the garage that goes in the trunk of my car and that's what i take i can get all my sounds with this this arsenal okay so what else do we have over here to tim we have the park 45 100 yep and then the basement sounds basement that i cannot find which i've been looking for is a 64 basement yeah the tuxedo version it's just it's just you know aesthetics it was when they had some white knobs they were making black black apps and they had white knobs so just an aesthetic thing i always wanted um any 64 will sound that good but uh then then the park which we love we love the park the 18 watt is great your blue 18 watt it's amazing yeah so and then there's all the pedals some of them are not hooked up right now because i'm actually redoing my studio but you know the pedals come and go you know different times different purposes one thing that i want you to see right here that i did get from tom buchovac's recommendation is the ebo reverb and this thing it sounds it sounds edible too let me turn it on [Music] now the thing about reverb and delay that i want you to understand is that to me it's best when you don't know it's there so whatever i'm doing sound wise you don't hear the delays i hide the delays and then the reverb you don't hear it until i play my last note let me turn it down just a little bit so i can prove that point but the idea isn't for to become part of the sound [Applause] and then i i even hide trying to hide the trails on delays so you don't hear just adds this dimension to it so you hear a little bit so basically oh it just makes the sound richer you know yeah so anyway we have to we all owe tom odette for being so generous and sharing all of his discoveries one of the things i like is i like to be sometimes the last guy to find the cool thing because all the other guys figure out what the cool thing is and they do all the work and then sometimes it takes a few months sometimes it takes a few years well that's why i just buy the stuff that you're playing in your videos talking about so never i mean never worry about waiting for something because let let these guys who were obsessed and great at finding this stuff let them find the stuff now then it might be hard to find it once once it becomes popular but uh anyway well tim thank you so much for inviting me over thank you i get a chance to hear your gear talk to you about all these things that i that it's funny we talk all the time but we actually don't talk about gear that much no and my enthusiasm is getting bigger all the time for this stuff and it's the last thing i expected at this point so yeah here we go cool i don't know what's next all right don't forget to subscribe to tim's channel it'll be in the description below subscribe to my channel as well don't just hit the notifications you know you need notifications just subscribe thanks see ya that's all for now don't forget to subscribe ring the bell and leave a comment check out my new quick lessons pro guitar course that just came out also the biato book if you want to learn about music theory that's how you do it and check out my biato ear training course at beautiertraining.com and don't forget if you want to support the channel even more think about becoming a member of the beato club thanks so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 1,215,651

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, Tim Pierce, guitar, guitar gear for beginners, guitar gear rundown, Studio Guitar, studio guitarist, studio guitar setup, marshall amplifier, marshall amp settings, how to get great guitar tone, Gibson, gibson les paul, fender stratocaster

Id: y8-CC_zf6wU

Length: 42min 56sec (2576 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2022