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Lot Essay
Over the years I’ve developed a style of recording using multi-layered guitar parts. It’s a technique I started in my bedroom at my parents’ house where I would record a part onto a TEAC cassette machine and then build up a backing track with a lot of overdubs that all worked together. Back then I only had the one guitar so it wasn’t easy to make all the layers sound very distinct. During the 1980s, as I made more albums and acquired different guitars, I was able to refine this approach. It’s the thing I love to do and I named the process ‘the Guitarchestra’.
- JOHNNY MARR, MARR'S GUITARS, 2023
Johnny Marr acquired this TEAC cassette machine in 1980, at a critical time when he was developing the skills that would set him apart as a uniquely imaginative songwriter and player, as well as allowing him to hone his recording techniques. Recounting this period to guitar expert Martin Kelly, Marr explained: I had a year zero, where I completely isolated myself. There was just me and Angie and the black Les Paul, and I went back to my parents' house and back to the drawing board. I treated my bedroom, my record player and my Fender Twin Reverb like a laboratory. I used a TEAC tape machine, which you could overdub on by just plugging into the front of it. I took all these concepts that I had and just did it all on the guitar, with no drum machine or effects. If I wanted to put a beat down, I would do it by scratching rhythm on the strings. That would give me my drum sound. Then I got a Boss Flanger pedal. I started experimenting, trying to find what I was feeling like, and those experiments turned into the early Smiths songs.
In his autobiography, Marr recalled using the tape machine to develop what would become his signature technique of layering multiple guitar parts: I’d recently traded my Les Paul for a red Gretsch Super Axe and [used] a Teac cassette machine that had an overdub facility. I’d work on a chord sequence until I was happy with it and then record a second guitar part on top. I would then bounce the two tracks together and experiment with putting more guitars on. I could build up the tracks by bouncing and overdubbing and create my own wall of sound. Eventually I had a lot of tapes of chord patterns and riffs done entirely with guitars, and Ollie [May, his housemate at Shelley Rohde’s house in Bowdon] and I would listen to them over and over. It was great to have the freedom to work on things, and I really liked having my own domain… I had my little three-track [sic] cassette machine that enabled me to put down an idea and then layer a riff over the top, and I became quite good at coming up with things that sounded full without it needing much else besides the guitar.
It was while living at Shelley Rohde’s house in Bowdon that Johnny Marr would meet Steven Morrissey, on 31 May 1982, where the tape machine in his attic bedroom would be a crucial element in the early development of their intensely creative song-writing partnership. Our second meeting was in my room at Shelley’s… Morrissey took out some more lyrics for me to work on. As I took the pages I saw the title ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’, and without thinking about it I started playing a chord change along the lines of the Patti Smith song ‘Kimberly’. It seemed to scan right with the words and suggested a bass line, which I played at the same time. I continued to play, and then Morrissey started singing the words, and within a few minutes the tune was born. After laughing a lot and rehearsing it a couple more times, I recorded what we had on my tape machine, then I overdubbed a ringing guitar line on top, and my new partner and I had our first song.
The TEAC tape machine helped set the template for Marr and Morrissey’s song-writing method in The Smiths, as Marr recalled in Set The Boy Free: New songs usually started with me recording the music onto a cassette and then giving it to Morrissey to write his lyrics and vocal lines, which he would complete within a day or two. Other times we would get together at my place and sit face to face, about three feet away from each other, while I played my new tune into a tape recorder that was balanced between my knees. All the early Smiths demos, including all the songs on their eponymous first album, were developed and recorded in this way, including their second single, ‘This Charming Man’, as Marr told Martin Kelly: I played these chords, the underlying chords, into my TEAC and I went G G G G G G G D, A minor, C D G. That was the bed of ‘This Charming Man’, and I pressed stop, and then I rewound it. I went to do the overdub and I just did that riff, straight away, on top of it.
The Smiths’ song-writing process was explained by Morrissey when interviewed by the BBC on 12 February 1985, the day after the release of their second studio album, Meat Is Murder: Johnny puts the music down on a cassette, with guitar, and he gives me the cassette, and I live with the cassette for a few days, and I just wheedle words into the cassette. By then the TEAC had been upgraded, likely when the band had moved to London in the summer of 1984 on the back of the enormous success of their first album. Specifically recounting a remarkably prolific weekend in June 1984 when he wrote what would become ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ and ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Marr recalled: Angie had gone back to Manchester for the weekend and the band had a rare couple of days off, so I found myself alone in the flat. I’d upgraded my early Teac cassette recorder for a four-track Tascam Portastudio and a Roland Dramatix drum machine. I decided that after I’d demoed the next A-side I would try to come up with the B-side and then the extra track for the 12-inch while I had the opportunity. In an interview for Guitarist magazine in February 1985, Marr told Geoff Twigg: Considering he [Morrissey] doesn’t play any instrument (and he's so against playing an instrument, he really does consider his forte to be vocals), he's got an amazing sense of melody and adventure. When we write, I normally take along the complete backing track which I put together on a Portastudio. I used to have a TEAC two-track with Simul-Sync and I did it on that but now I can put four tracks down.
- JOHNNY MARR, MARR'S GUITARS, 2023
Johnny Marr acquired this TEAC cassette machine in 1980, at a critical time when he was developing the skills that would set him apart as a uniquely imaginative songwriter and player, as well as allowing him to hone his recording techniques. Recounting this period to guitar expert Martin Kelly, Marr explained: I had a year zero, where I completely isolated myself. There was just me and Angie and the black Les Paul, and I went back to my parents' house and back to the drawing board. I treated my bedroom, my record player and my Fender Twin Reverb like a laboratory. I used a TEAC tape machine, which you could overdub on by just plugging into the front of it. I took all these concepts that I had and just did it all on the guitar, with no drum machine or effects. If I wanted to put a beat down, I would do it by scratching rhythm on the strings. That would give me my drum sound. Then I got a Boss Flanger pedal. I started experimenting, trying to find what I was feeling like, and those experiments turned into the early Smiths songs.
In his autobiography, Marr recalled using the tape machine to develop what would become his signature technique of layering multiple guitar parts: I’d recently traded my Les Paul for a red Gretsch Super Axe and [used] a Teac cassette machine that had an overdub facility. I’d work on a chord sequence until I was happy with it and then record a second guitar part on top. I would then bounce the two tracks together and experiment with putting more guitars on. I could build up the tracks by bouncing and overdubbing and create my own wall of sound. Eventually I had a lot of tapes of chord patterns and riffs done entirely with guitars, and Ollie [May, his housemate at Shelley Rohde’s house in Bowdon] and I would listen to them over and over. It was great to have the freedom to work on things, and I really liked having my own domain… I had my little three-track [sic] cassette machine that enabled me to put down an idea and then layer a riff over the top, and I became quite good at coming up with things that sounded full without it needing much else besides the guitar.
It was while living at Shelley Rohde’s house in Bowdon that Johnny Marr would meet Steven Morrissey, on 31 May 1982, where the tape machine in his attic bedroom would be a crucial element in the early development of their intensely creative song-writing partnership. Our second meeting was in my room at Shelley’s… Morrissey took out some more lyrics for me to work on. As I took the pages I saw the title ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’, and without thinking about it I started playing a chord change along the lines of the Patti Smith song ‘Kimberly’. It seemed to scan right with the words and suggested a bass line, which I played at the same time. I continued to play, and then Morrissey started singing the words, and within a few minutes the tune was born. After laughing a lot and rehearsing it a couple more times, I recorded what we had on my tape machine, then I overdubbed a ringing guitar line on top, and my new partner and I had our first song.
The TEAC tape machine helped set the template for Marr and Morrissey’s song-writing method in The Smiths, as Marr recalled in Set The Boy Free: New songs usually started with me recording the music onto a cassette and then giving it to Morrissey to write his lyrics and vocal lines, which he would complete within a day or two. Other times we would get together at my place and sit face to face, about three feet away from each other, while I played my new tune into a tape recorder that was balanced between my knees. All the early Smiths demos, including all the songs on their eponymous first album, were developed and recorded in this way, including their second single, ‘This Charming Man’, as Marr told Martin Kelly: I played these chords, the underlying chords, into my TEAC and I went G G G G G G G D, A minor, C D G. That was the bed of ‘This Charming Man’, and I pressed stop, and then I rewound it. I went to do the overdub and I just did that riff, straight away, on top of it.
The Smiths’ song-writing process was explained by Morrissey when interviewed by the BBC on 12 February 1985, the day after the release of their second studio album, Meat Is Murder: Johnny puts the music down on a cassette, with guitar, and he gives me the cassette, and I live with the cassette for a few days, and I just wheedle words into the cassette. By then the TEAC had been upgraded, likely when the band had moved to London in the summer of 1984 on the back of the enormous success of their first album. Specifically recounting a remarkably prolific weekend in June 1984 when he wrote what would become ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ and ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Marr recalled: Angie had gone back to Manchester for the weekend and the band had a rare couple of days off, so I found myself alone in the flat. I’d upgraded my early Teac cassette recorder for a four-track Tascam Portastudio and a Roland Dramatix drum machine. I decided that after I’d demoed the next A-side I would try to come up with the B-side and then the extra track for the 12-inch while I had the opportunity. In an interview for Guitarist magazine in February 1985, Marr told Geoff Twigg: Considering he [Morrissey] doesn’t play any instrument (and he's so against playing an instrument, he really does consider his forte to be vocals), he's got an amazing sense of melody and adventure. When we write, I normally take along the complete backing track which I put together on a Portastudio. I used to have a TEAC two-track with Simul-Sync and I did it on that but now I can put four tracks down.