13.10 Musical examples#
Pink Floyd - Run Like Hell (1979)#
David Gilmour plays this song’s guitar riff as a steady pulse of palm-muted notes, through a delay that adds three or four decaying echoes to each one. The echoes fall between the notes that he plays, turning the steady pulse into a galloping rhythm. Listen starting at 1:37.
The Doobie Brothers - Listen to the Music (1972)#
From the bridge of this song (around 2:20) until it fades out, the entire mix is flanged, so that the whole band seems to sweep and whoosh like a passing jet plane.
Nirvana - Come As You Are (1991)#
Kurt Cobain played this song’s murky, wavering guitar riff through a chorus effect, which thickens a single guitar into what sounds like several slightly detuned guitars playing together.
The Kinks - You Really Got Me (1964)#
To get the gritty guitar sound of this song, Dave Davies famously slashed the speaker cone of his small amplifier with a razor blade. The resulting distortion helped define the sound of rock guitar for decades to come.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Purple Haze (1967)#
Jimi Hendrix’s heavily distorted guitar defines the sound of this song. For the guitar solo, he paired a Fuzz Face distortion pedal with an Octavia, an effect that doubles the frequency of the guitar’s signal, much like the Chebyshev polynomial \(T_2\) doubles the frequency of a sinusoid. The result adds a tone an octave above every note that he plays.
Eric Prydz - Call On Me (2004)#
This dance hit audibly pumps in time with its kick drum: the rest of the mix ducks every time the kick hits, and then swells back up. Dance music producers typically create this pumping with side-chain compression.
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Gesang der Jünglinge (1956)#
One of the first masterpieces of electronic music, this piece weaves a boy’s singing voice together with electronic sounds. Stockhausen composed it for playback over five channels of loudspeakers surrounding the audience, at a time when stereo was still a novelty, which made the location of each sound a part of the composition.