Grateful Dead Music Forum

I started seeking the Jerry tone about 2 years ago. I guess I did what many do, hoping to get there with easy/inexpensive “fixes”. I’ll save that "tone quest" related story for another time, but with respect to this discussion, I did recently finally get right in the pocket of his 77/78ish tone.

My audible references, as it were, to get the tone have been based on the live shows that I’ve seen (96), and years of daily listening to hours of Dead on my long drive to and from work, a 3 hour round trip each day.

Back in the 70’s-90’s I did sit down with recordings and learn a large portion the songs on guitar (to be accurate, I merely learned the chord progressions and occasional common licks), but there have been a whole lot of days between then and now. So, recently I have sat down with a really nice and powerful stereo system and played along with various live shows, I imagine for the first time ever, in this context anyway.

Several things became immediately evident, and those things are the reason for my need/want to share in this post. Here are some of the related observations, in no particular order.

1. I didn’t realize just how critical “playing along” with recordings was, with regard to the final fine tuning of attaining Jerry’s tone. Before, I was so close, but when one can really match up with him, slight adjustments get made that REALLY dial it in. I was off base in my midrange settings and my gain structures, both of which, with slight tweaking, are now spot on.

2. I found myself..…well…conflicted. Although playing with the Dead was unimaginably gratifying on many levels, I felt…wrong…for stinking the sonic joint up. Sacred was, if not failing, somewhat sullied before profane (my playing). Honestly I’m still wrestling with this a bit. I feel like I should pull out the CD’s I’m playing along with and give them a hot shower…maybe let them curl up in the fetal position for a while, and then go to counseling. And I walk away feeling very small, like an ant next to an elephant must feel. The combination of sheepishness and power is confounding.

3. One thing Brad told me a couple of years ago really became both painfully and beautifully evident. Warm up time is huge. I couldn’t just sit down and be there. My tone was sort of there, but the nuances of attack and dynamics needed a good 20-30 minutes before things really gelled.

4. As nuts as this sounds, I sort of am lost with respect to my “role” when playing along. Part of me wants to play Jerry inspired solos over everything. Part of me wants to play off Bobby. Part of me falls into the absurd role of 3rd guitarist, where I’ll try to add (that’s a laugh) to the songs without stepping on Bob or Jer. Half of me plays along and learns how to do things right, the other half gets sucked into a performing/improvisational mindset. One thing for sure though, I am learning an awful lot very fast. After playing along for say 45 minutes or so, I feel like I just played a 3 hour gig. I’m super pumped up and mentally exhausted at the same time.

5. Playing along kind of allows one to see….alternate…views of the impeccable infrastructure of what The Dead are doing musically. Complex songs can get simple and simple songs can get complex. Sometimes seeing the beauty from a slightly different vantage point can deepen appreciation.


So that was all I had. Just wanted to get some of it out of my head, perhaps to free up processing space, which has new demands placed on it.

The one thing about matching Jerry's tone is that if you don't have a reference, you are always feeling like something is lacking.
fwiw, I started playing along with my Steal Your Face record in 8th or 9th Grade, '77-ish?, and love to play along with the huge assortment of GD vids and recordings to this day.
One of these days they will probably come out with a way to mute whichever player you want for play-along purposes (they call these minus-1 tracks, but they don't have them for GD yet as far as I know), but there are alot of recordings where you can mute Jerry or Bobby by turning the Balance knob all the way to the right or left.
One good one is Bob Weir "Ace". You can get your Black Throated Wind tone dialed in (Strat, between bridge and middle), then put your speaker cab where your left stereo speaker is, turn the balance all the way to the right, and you are Jerry.
Don't feel in the least bit conflicted... His job is to shed light, not to master.

5/26/73 is one of the best recordings for almost entirely excluding Jerry from mix just by relying on one channel.

"Audicity" is free and really useful software for what you are doing. You can take a recording like 5/26, delete the Jerry channel and then save the remaining channel in "stereo" so it plays out of your L and R channels. You can change tempo without changing pitch if you want to slow things down (useful for tunes played at too fast a tempo for your comfort level, and useful for the many, many recordings that were recorded, or remastered, at too fast a speed so that playing along in concert tuning will never sound right).

It's also very easy to slice and dice tunes, so if you find a verse or two in a jam where Jerry is sitting back playing nothing, you can copy that segment, seamlessly paste it together over and over, and wind up with a long, full-band segment of music free of that pesky lead guitarist.

There are alot of Sugar Mags that Jer lays out for quite a while at the beginning of the ending jam in the Key of B.
I've used my JamMan Looper on things like this to create a jam loop.

Maybe you can post that show with Jerry already removed?

Try playing along in the morning with ear buds on at a low volume. I had a guitar teacher when I was a kid who pointed out our ears our fresh in the morning and we can discern more of what's going on in a complex recording. I like using ear buds as I can hear the idiosyncrasies of Jerry's playing better. Like hearing which strong he's on rather than just what note he's playing.

Peace,

James

I've never actually tweaked & saved any of the tunes from 5.26.73, but if there are a couple in particular that anybody wants, I can do it.

In the meantime, I did play around with Sugaree. The file is small enough to gmail to anyone who wants it -- especially if they'd be willing to upload it somewhere and share the link on this board.

Nothing fancy. I deleted Jerry's channel, and copied the remaining channel in its place. Stretched out the introduction since Jerry didn't do an intro solo. Stretched out the first solo to be about 4 or 5 times longer than the original. Then I copied the extended first solo over the second solo since some of Jerry's real highs bled through the mix. And that's about it. There are some noticeable copy/paste transitions, but nothing too harsh. The end result is no Jerry and the 7 or 8 minute (give or take) version from the original recording is now about 15 minutes long. Sort of a '73 Sugaree transformed into a '77 version.