Well known as guitarist with glam art‑rock pioneers Roxy Music, Phil Manzanera has also etched out parallel careers as solo artist, session musician and producer. Over the course of his 50‑year career Manzanera has contributed to over 80 albums, and his production credits include albums by Split Enz, John Cale and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. Asked to dissect a favourite sound, he chooses the guitar tone he created for Roxy Music’s ‘Amazona’.
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The guitar sound on that track is totally unique, even though I will say it myself. It’s one which I’ve never been able to repeat. When we started recording the album, I was faced with a dilemma because Brian Eno had left the band, and on the previous two albums I had used Eno to treat my guitar through his VCS synthesizer, and the combination of my direct sound and the treated sound created a unique sound.
“You have to remember that in those days you could only get really a fuzzbox and wah‑wah pedal and some kind of echo unit, and so to create unique sounds was very difficult. And I thought that in order for me to be able to treat my guitar myself, I needed to have some specially made guitar modules by the same people who had made Brian Eno‘s VCS3 synthesizer.
“So, I rang them up and they actually made me two modules which had the envelope shaper and a modulator. But because they had knobs on them, I had to work out how to control it using a different method, which was by the use of DeArmond volume pedals, which went up and down sideways to control the filter and the modulation. I also had a special unit made with a pin board on it so that I could send signals to different areas of the VCS’s three modules. I could then control this from the volume pedals. So, it came out of this and into a Revox tape recorder which had been modified with sel‑sync and vari‑pitch, which I also controlled with another DeArmond volume pedal.”
Phil Manzanera: What’s on the record is a unique recording, and I defy anybody in the last 52 years to come up with a similar sound.
One Time Only
“In theory this should’ve been quite a stable unit but in practice, it was incredibly unstable, so when I played the guitar part on this track, it worked brilliantly, but only once. I was never able to repeat it, so what’s on the record is a unique recording, and I defy anybody in the last 52 years to come up with a similar sound. Of course, having the fantastic producer Chris Thomas work on our album — a gentleman who had worked with the Beatles and George Martin — meant that the mic placement on my Hiwatt amp and WEM speaker cabinet and also the Fender Twin Reverb was immaculate, and helped create that unique sound that’s on the record too.
“I have to mention too, that it was recorded at AIR Studios in London, the studio that George Martin had set up after he decided to leave Abbey Road. And as an extra note, Ice‑T sampled it, to create a hip‑hop track, ‘That’s How I’m Livin’ in 1993.”