Q: "Pretty Mary K" guitar effect?

[lysander]

My first post after many months as a lurker -- could anyone help me out identifying how they got that guitar sound on Pretty Mary K, on Elliott Smith's Figure 8 album? It sounds to me like a rotary or leslie effect of some sort, but I can't exactly place it. Beautiful sound, though.

[dynomike]

Funny... I usually skip that song to get to "Can't Make a Sound". When the electric guitars and drums come in, oh man. The slide and fingerpicked electrics sound phenomenal. Actually everything does. Great sounding album.

I'll take a listen to Pretty Mary K next time and let you know.

[HuskerDude]

It sounds like a Leslie, although my guitarist can get a sound really similar to that with his Mutron phaser.

[lysander]

Thanks for the suggestions -- there's an organ at parts of the song, so there would have been a leslie around for them to use. But it does have a certain phasey quality to it, too. The trouble is, he's such a good player that it can be hard tell when he's double-tracking or not -- I've listened hard to the bass part on "Baby Britain," for example, and sometimes I think that he's double-tracked that part to make it sound as fat as it does.

[the velour fog]

on a similar note, what about the end of everybody cares, everybody understands on XO. what is it that kicks in at 2:47 and continues to the end of the song? that sounds awesome.

[lysander]

Now THAT is a trippy sound! I'll guess guitar, distortion, wah for the eq (or an onboard parametric that's getting swept), and then something that's doing that manual/random register-shifting. It reminds of some of the sounds that Robert Fripp and Larry Fast used to get with Peter Gabriel.