Adrian Belew – Desire Caught By The Tail

Featured in this March 19, 2020 Facebook post.

😉

one of my favorite devices from the early eighties is this Electro Harmonix Echoflanger. this is the original one I used on so many records from 1981 onward. it’s missing the all-important 4-way selector knob so it can’t be made active, but I have another in much better condition I bought from mike at Analog Man years ago which works perfectly.

you can see the “dot settings” I put on it, one of which would be the “elephant sound” for “elephant talk”, one of which would be the “rhino sound” for “lone rhino”, and another of which would be the guitar sound for “genius of love”.

I discovered by accident the one thing I love most about it. the missing 4-way knob was faulty and could be made to “stick” between settings. sticking it between “chorus” and “flanger” was the way I made the sound for “genius of love.”

my very favorite sound I made with it started by sticking it between those settings, but then came the fun. if you carefully adjusted the “feedback” it would start to oscillate. then you could fiddle with the “tune”, “width”, and “depth” knobs to create the sound of giant metallic insects flying across the stereo image.

in the 80’s I had it mounted on my mic stand so I could get that sound to “stick” and then manipulate the knobs to create my crazy oscillation effects. one of the music magazines in japan had a cartoon of me doing just that with me looking like Frankenstein!

I used that sound many times on record (I still do). to hear it, listen to the ending of “Gypsy Zurna” on “Desire Caught By The Tail”.

(don’t have that record? it’s available for download of bandcamp.)

I’m just sayin’.

Belew purchased a GR-700 when it was released in 1984 and used it throughout the 80s and 90s, as known from the following sources:

One Two Testing, February 1985, "Adrian Belew"

What was your favourite instrument of 1984?

"It would be the Roland GR700 guitar synthesiser, because it has increased my musical vocabulary so much. Being a guitarist who concentrates on sound and tonal colours and things of that nature, I find the 700 so useful because that's the area in which it excels. It's the first time with guitar synthesis that you've been able to create a sound from scratch, like a keyboard player would do, and also to be able to store that sound on a cartridge. It's very convenient. Having had the GR700 for about four months now, I'm definitely in love with it. I've really incorporated its little quirks into my music now.

"It does of course have some tracking problems, which is something everyone says when the 700 is mentioned. I've found ways of minimising that — bearing in mind that I don't use the guitar that comes with it, I use guitars I've had a while and am comfortable with. It doesn't track as well as the previous guitar synth, the 300, presumably because it's digital and it's converting the signal from the guitar into digits. So if the guitar signal is in the least bit confusing to the computer inside the 700 then it doesn't know how to read that signal, it doesn't know what to convert.

"So the intonation of your guitar becomes ultimately the most important thing — if you play a note that is clean and clear to the computer it'll probably track it fine. If not you're likely to get bleeps or something, or no note at all. It takes a couple of hours adjusting to get right, including getting the individual pickup volumes right.

"You have to be aware that you can get too deeply involved in it — it is, for me, simply an orchestrating tool. It's not something to replace the other facets of my playing. I think it would be pretty easy for someone who was playing it to get so involved in it that soon all they'd be playing was synth and no guitar. It's not the instrument for everyone, certainly — if you want to play fast arpeggios or power chords or things like that then you're biting the wrong dog."

Downbeat, December 1986, "Adrian Belew: Twang Bar King" by Gene Santoro

It's not too surprising, then, to find that Desire Caught By The Tail frequently finds him doing just that, albeit with completely instrumental pieces of more ambitious musical scope. Coupling the nearly 200 sounds he's developed for the Roland GR-700 guitar-synth ("I even found a way to make it play itself!") with his increasingly adept use of backwards tracking and vari-speeding, Adrian Belew has taken a commercial risk that pays off artistic dividends — and, once again, helps redefine the voice of the guitar.

ADRIAN BELEW'S EQUIPMENT

Adrian Belew says, "I'm using four guitars now. First are the two Twang-Bar Wonderbeast guitars with artwork by Mike Goetz. Each has a different tuning — one is normal, the other has the G tuned up to A so I can get different voicings and avoid pentatonic scales. Starting off at the headstock, they have bow-and-tuning heads, thereby eliminating the need for retaining bars which stop you from being able to play in the back of the head or bend strings at the nut. They have Seymour Duncan pickups, Kahler tremolo arms, and all the guts from the Roland synthesizer. The same is true of the third guitar I use, except that the artwork is by Laurie Anderson, and that it's tuned to the same tuning as my dobro, E-B-E-E-B-E, with heavier gauge strings, the low E being a .052 and the high E being a .012. Usually I use medium-light Gibson strings, with the high E being a .010 and the low E a .042 I use Fender medium picks. The fourth guitar is my battered 1967 Stratocaster from the David Bowie period, with a broken bass pickup [laughs] and it feeds back better than any other guitar I have.

"My two amps are Roland JC-120s — I've used one on everything from 1977 on. Right now, my floor situation looks something like this — I have the GR-700, the Roland SDE-3000 delay, an Ibanez harmonizer, a Big Muff fuzztone, a Foxtone fuzztone, the Electro-Harmonix echo-flanger — which makes the wonderful metallic insect sounds on Desire — the new Roland compressor — I always use lots of compression — a Roland pitch-shifter, and the Electro-Harmonix 16-second delay, which I've had converted to do backwards tape loops."

Facebook, Adrian Belew, November 14, 2021

trivia points for Here:

•May 1, 1990 begins with the rather spooky sound of my GR-700 synthesizer playing itself! the title refers to the evening martha and I met in orlando, florida at the Peabody Hotel following the sound and vision show I had just done with david.

Facebook, Adrian Belew, November 21, 2021 & adrianbelew.net, Discography, "the experimental guitar series volume 1: guitar as orchestra"

trivia points for Guitar As Orchestra:

•having released 4 pop-ish records in a row I was due to make a 180 degree turn. by this time I had worked extensively with 3 different guitar synth models (Roland gr-700, gr-50, and gr-1) and written a library of several hundred sounds. they weren’t samples, they were programs created by long late night experimentation. I felt it was time for someone to build an orchestra using only guitar.

•you can’t imagine the first-time thrill of playing my guitar and having it sound like a piano. a whole new universe appeared!

•having listened to this record for the first time in many years I was surprised at how ahead of its time it truly was. some of the better pieces would still make good film score material today. IMHO

•there really isn’t much in the way of trivia points since the whole record, be it tympani, harp, piano, or bassoon is guitar synthesizer. even the “audience applause” at the beginning was made with a guitar synth. so instead I will reprint here some of the liner notes from the record:

adrianbelew.net, Discography, "desire caught by the tail"

the most important instrument I used throughout the record was the Roland GR-700 guitar synthesizer (picture three). mine was sent to me by roland, directly from japan. it was such a new instrument they hadn’t yet written a manual for it! over many months time I wrote 200 different sounding programs with it. that was a big reason why I ended up making such an avant-garde record.

my GR-700 which I still have, does quirky things others don’t do. for example, if I plug a guitar chord into the expression pedal without plugging the other end INTO something, the synthe goes crazy and plays itself!! a good example of that sound is what you hear throughout track 7 called Guernica.

adrianbelew.net, Discography, "op zop too wah"

during the making of the record there was a 4-day period where everyone would be absent. my family on vacation and ken visiting his parents left me in the house/studio alone. before ken left I had him set up the means for me to record myself drumming (with a slight bit of flanging for the sound I wanted.) for 4 days I did nothing but play drums (picture four). practicing to get myself up to speed, I would sometimes record sections of soloing. by the time ken returned I had several performances I was happy with and chose one for Word Play Drum Beat. for lyrics I recorded friends of mine saying single words suggestive of violence. someone says “pipe”, I add “bomb.” someone says “hair”, I add “trigger.” so my word changed the meaning of their word.

then comes a quick flurry of snippets: my GR-700 playing itself, train cars coupling, and a british woman saying “what is that?!”

[...]

there is truly not a sadder song I have written than The Ruin After The Rain, considering the very personal tragedy it was written about. not something I care to reveal. I don’t consider myself much of a pianist, this is about as good as I get. it was played on my trusty old Howard (picture eight) from the days of Mr. Music Head. howard still resides in my living room. the choruses are filled out with horn sounds from the GR-700 and chords on the dobro. and of course a splash of rain at the end.

Innerviews, "Adrian Belew: The Love Bubble" by Anil Prasad (2022)

Desire Caught by The Tail (1986).

[...]

I had one more record left in my Island Records contract for three albums, and had just got the Roland GR-700 guitar synthesizer from Japan. I was probably one of the very first people to get one. It had a Japanese-only manual and I was left to figure it out on my own. I started furiously programming it.

I loved it so much. It was a big old giant analog guitar synthesizer—the first of its kind. I was programming sounds like cello, piccolo flute, and oboe, and deciding what to do with all of this work.

Vintage Guitar, November 2022, "Adrian Belew: Still Going Up"

You pioneered guitar synthesizers 40 years ago, but the technology never really caught on.

Yeah, and my favorite was the Roland GR-700, which used cartridges to store sounds, but they went dead after about five years. Guitar synths may be considered relics by some people, but I’m thrilled with all the unique sounds and inspiration they afforded me over the years. Now, I don’t use any unless I need a particular sound on a record.

Visible among Belew's effects rack in Adrian Belew: Electronic Guitar (1984) at 2:41. He also lists it in the December 1986 Downbeat interview "Adrian Belew: Twang Bar King" by Gene Santoro:

ADRIAN BELEW'S EQUIPMENT

Adrian Belew says, "I'm using four guitars now. First are the two Twang-Bar Wonderbeast guitars with artwork by Mike Goetz. Each has a different tuning — one is normal, the other has the G tuned up to A so I can get different voicings and avoid pentatonic scales. Starting off at the headstock, they have bow-and-tuning heads, thereby eliminating the need for retaining bars which stop you from being able to play in the back of the head or bend strings at the nut. They have Seymour Duncan pickups, Kahler tremolo arms, and all the guts from the Roland synthesizer. The same is true of the third guitar I use, except that the artwork is by Laurie Anderson, and that it's tuned to the same tuning as my dobro, E-B-E-E-B-E, with heavier gauge strings, the low E being a .052 and the high E being a .012. Usually I use medium-light Gibson strings, with the high E being a .010 and the low E a .042 I use Fender medium picks. The fourth guitar is my battered 1967 Stratocaster from the David Bowie period, with a broken bass pickup [laughs] and it feeds back better than any other guitar I have.

"My two amps are Roland JC-120s — I've used one on everything from 1977 on. Right now, my floor situation looks something like this — I have the GR-700, the Roland SDE-3000 delay, an Ibanez harmonizer, a Big Muff fuzztone, a Foxtone fuzztone, the Electro-Harmonix echo-flanger — which makes the wonderful metallic insect sounds on Desire — the new Roland compressor — I always use lots of compression — a Roland pitch-shifter, and the Electro-Harmonix 16-second delay, which I've had converted to do backwards tape loops."

Belew lists the SDE-3000 among his "floor situation" equipment in the December 1986, Downbeat interview "Adrian Belew: Twang Bar King" by Gene Santoro.

ADRIAN BELEW'S EQUIPMENT

Adrian Belew says, "I'm using four guitars now. First are the two Twang-Bar Wonderbeast guitars with artwork by Mike Goetz. Each has a different tuning — one is normal, the other has the G tuned up to A so I can get different voicings and avoid pentatonic scales. Starting off at the headstock, they have bow-and-tuning heads, thereby eliminating the need for retaining bars which stop you from being able to play in the back of the head or bend strings at the nut. They have Seymour Duncan pickups, Kahler tremolo arms, and all the guts from the Roland synthesizer. The same is true of the third guitar I use, except that the artwork is by Laurie Anderson, and that it's tuned to the same tuning as my dobro, E-B-E-E-B-E, with heavier gauge strings, the low E being a .052 and the high E being a .012. Usually I use medium-light Gibson strings, with the high E being a .010 and the low E a .042 I use Fender medium picks. The fourth guitar is my battered 1967 Stratocaster from the David Bowie period, with a broken bass pickup [laughs] and it feeds back better than any other guitar I have.

"My two amps are Roland JC-120s — I've used one on everything from 1977 on. Right now, my floor situation looks something like this — I have the GR-700, the Roland SDE-3000 delay, an Ibanez harmonizer, a Big Muff fuzztone, a Foxtone fuzztone, the Electro-Harmonix echo-flanger — which makes the wonderful metallic insect sounds on Desire — the new Roland compressor — I always use lots of compression — a Roland pitch-shifter, and the Electro-Harmonix 16-second delay, which I've had converted to do backwards tape loops."