Check out Noel's guitar army!
"In the studio, I'll use any guitar I can get my hands on,"
says Noel Gallagher.
"But what I've been playing live is a 1970 black Les Paul Custom with
two black P-90 pickups that I took out of my "68 Firebird."
Onstage, Noel has recently taken to using two 40-watt Clark
amplifiers-meticulously faithful, hand-built copies of the guitarist's
beloved Fifties Fender Bandmaster.
"I used to just have a bank of Marshalls onstage, and it would be this
huge mush," he says.
"But the doctor told me I've got to turn things down, 'cuz I'm going a bit
dead in one ear. So the Clark amplifiers are brilliant, man. I use two side
by side: one with all the top rolled off and one with all the treble full on.
I also just got hold of a [Vox] AC-15, which is fucking incredible."
In the studio, Gallagher will still pull out one of his '65 Epiphone Casinos;
he owns vintage and reissue models, as well as the John Lennon models and,
of course, the Noel Gallagher model.But one of his main guitars for Standing
on the Shoulder of Giants was a 1964 Gibson ES-355.
"That's what I used all over the album for Rhythm tracks," he says.
Sessions for Standing On The Shoulder took Oasis as far afield as France,
where the group commandeered a chateau owned by Christian Dior. But most of
the guitar work was recorded back home in England, either on Noel's bedroom
recording rig or in the full-on studio he acquired a while ago.
"Once you've been in Abbey Road and it's not all it's cracked up to be,"
he shrugs,
"you say, 'Well, where do we go now?' ".
Not surprisingly, the vibe is heavily vintage at the guitarist's own studio.
"It used to belong to Alvin Lee, from Ten Years After. It's a small studio.
The live room is only about 20 by 15. And it's dead: carpets on the ceiling
and walls. So it's great for guitar speakers. You can manipulate any guitar
tone you want out of there.The equipment is all vintage: an old Studer 1610
multitrack and a Studer quarter-inch mastering machine. I've got an old
EMI Mark II board with the big aircraft faders. I use all EMI preamps,
Fairchild and Telefunken compressors. All the outboard gear that we used on
the album is vintage-apart from Pro Tools."
Noel seems equally proud of the guitar tracks recorded in his bedroom,
which include the album opener, "Fucking in the Bushes."
"There's not one amplifier on that,"
he proclaims.
"It's all through a SansAmp, the little pedal. 'Cuz it was done in my bedroom
you see, and all I've got up there is a [mixing] desk and a computer."
Session engineer and multi-instrumentalist Paul Stacey played lead guitar on
the track.
"And the actual guitar we used was a Tokai Stratocaster,"
Noel marvels.
"Paul collects all those kinds of guitars. I went over to his house and
said, 'What the fuck is that?' He said, 'Oh man, that's the greatest
sounding Strat ever.' I go, 'Bollocks, it's fuckin' red, man. Can't be any
good. It's Tokai, man.' He plugged it in, and I go, 'Oh, I see.' A lot of
the Seventies stuff that came out of Japan was fucking great. Paul used an
Ibanez Flying V for his solo on "Roll It Over," and it worked better for
that song than my '64 Strat or any of my expensive vintage guitars. That
track just needed something a bit 'orrible."
The album's psychedelic guitar tour de force, "Who Feels Love," was also
done in Noel's bedroom, with all guitars recorded direct via a SansAmp.
Longtime Oasis cohort Mark Coyle played Noel's white Jerry Jones electric
sitar. The fluttering, backward textures heard on the track are Pro Tools
manipulations of a guitar track played by Paul Stacey.
"Paul's a fantastic guitarist,"
says Noel.
"And instead of having the usual obligatory backward notes, I said to him,
'Can you do all that stuff on the fretboard? [i.e. tapping] He said,
'Oh yeah.' So we got him doing all that punter, heavy-metal shredding, or
whatever you call it, as fast as possible. Then we slowed it down and turned
it all backward, and it sounded brilliant. That was quite magical in the
studio."
One of Noel's standout guitar moments on the album is his Neil Young-ish
lead work on "Where Did It All Go Wrong?"
"I used the 355 with the whammy bar up, playing through a little Fender
Princeton amp,"
he recalls.
"The lead solo was double tracked. It's the same part, but layered maybe
three or four times with different tones. When you get that going through
the EMI board with the eq and all, it's just great. It is very Neil Young,
yeah."
And that's also Noel bashing out the bruising power chords on "I Can See
A Liar."
"That's a black-front '64 Fender Deluxe amp, with the silver cloth,"
he elaborates.
"And the guitar was a yellow TV model Les Paul Junior-the classic punk rock
guitar!. That was like, 'Today I will be Steve Jones!' With a bit of AC/DC
in there as well. The bass on that is a black Fender Telecaster bass with a
mirrored scratch plate [pickguard]. It's an old Sixties model, and it's
going through an old Acoustic VS Musician bass rig. That is just pure rock
and roll, man. It's Liam's favorite song. I didn't want to have it on the
album at first, because I think it's too much of a "Be Here Now" track. But
because it's so fuckin' AC/DC, we just said, 'We gotta have one of them on
the album, 'aven't we?' It'll be great live. It's a total live song."
In addition to the tracks already mentioned, Noel also played lead guitar on
"Little James," "Gas Panic!" and "Sunday Morning Call." He split the lead
guitar duties with Paul Stacey on the closing track, "Roll It Over."
"The best lead guitar bit on the whole record is Paul's solo on
'Roll It Over,'" he says.
"It's the last bit, the one that sounds like Free. And I didn't play that
'cuz I haven't got a beard yet. It's a real 50-year-old's guitar solo."
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