Vintage Guitar - September 2017 - open - 88

WE ENDED UP AT THE
GRAND HOTEL
It was empty, cold and bare
But with the Rolling truck
Stones thing just outside
Making our music there
With a few red lights, a few old beds
We made a place to sweat...
They ran long cables from the van and
used bed mattresses to deaden the sound
space. Much of the recording took place
in hotel rooms and corridors - hardly a
glamorous recording studio - but with nowlegendary engineer Martin Birch (Jeff Beck
Group, Fleetwood Mac), they made it work,
and the tapes speak for themselves. The
resulting music had the loose, cranked-up
vibe of a concert, minus the screaming fans.
"We were recording in the corridors, and
the amps were put in the rooms off the corridor for separation purposes," Blackmore
recalls with characteristic brevity.

THAT MAGICAL
MYSTERY TONE
There's a world of myth and mystery
about Blackmore's guitar tone on Machine
Head. Just how did he get that woody,
airy Strat sound with a perfect amount
of sustain and overdrive - but not overt
distortion? His lead tone on the album is
sweet, midrangey, and profoundly Fend-

eresque, evoking Holy Grail connotations.
Let's get to the facts.
First, the crunch heard throughout
Machine Head is the critical mass of Blackmore's guitar, Roger Glover's Rickenbacker
and Fender basses, and - crucially - Jon
Lord's massively distorted Hammond
organ, which he pumped through Marshall
stacks (his rig was known as The Beast for
good reason), and he achieved a sound not
unlike a guitar's power chord. The combined efforts created that monster Deep
Purple thud so clearly heard on "Highway
Star," "Space Truckin'," and "Smoke on the
Water." Lord's intro to "Lazy" is emblematic of his savagely distorted Hammond.
Solidbodies on Machine Head were
CBS-era with big headstocks, maple
fingerboards, three-way switches, and
presumably four-bolt necks. In the subsequent Rainbow years, he converted to
scalloped-rosewood fingerboards and
three-bolt necks. He only used the neck and
bridge single-coil pickups - the middle unit
screwed as low as possible so it wouldn't
interfere with his picking; he avoided the
in-between second and fourth positions.
When trying to decipher his tone, one
key error is to confuse Blackmore's live
rig with the studio setup. On tour, he was
plugging his Strat into a 200-watt Marshall
Major head and two cabinets (with another
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September 2017

stack as a backup). The Marshalls had been
modded at the factory with an added output
stage, increasing the volume, and the EQs
were specially voiced. Yet we also know that
Blackmore was fond of Vox AC30 amps for
their warm, natural, and dirty tone. In some
interviews he alludes to using Vox guts
hidden in a Marshall housing then slaving
it to the big Marshall head, in effect using
a AC30 to preamp the Major. But again,
this was the stage rig. Also keep in mind
that tales of Blackmore's famed Aiwa reelto-reel tape recorder - which he used as a
preamp - appear to date from '74 forward,
long after the Grand Hotel sessions. Same
with scalloped fingerboards.
We asked VG amp guru Dave Hunter
about these perceptions.
"We remember those riffs from Machine
Head as being huge, and convince ourselves
they were recorded via some massive Marshall stack. Largely, though, it's just that
they sounded so big compared to much of
what else was being recorded at the time,
and because of the attitude put into them.
Listening back today, they really don't
sound stack-like at all."
After 45 years of debate and controversy,
Blackmore himself helped clear the air.
"I was using a 100-watt Marshall with
four 12" speakers in the cabinet. I probably
would've also been using the Vox at that

Blackmore in '74: Fin Costello/Redferns.

Blackmore backstage
in early 1974 with
several recent Strats.
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