Cocteau Twins/Robin Guthrie guitar sound

[desotoslo]

there is no other group that sounds like cocteau twins. i love their songs. they make me feel sad and happy at the same time.

[Chaellus]

Originally Posted by desotoslo

there is no other group that sounds like cocteau twins. i love their songs. they make me feel sad and happy at the same time.

they are a great group although i do know a few bands that sound similar...but never were in the limelight like they were... their music speaks to me.... you know the saying you are what you eat? well this bands music kinda fits my mood perfectly...it was great listening to them when i was little... their guitars are nothing more than Reverb Delay chorusing maybe a bit of flanging but really slick

[Chaellus]

YouTube - Shoegaze Guitar Lesson - Cocteau Twins 'Pink Orange Red'

[Tubthumper]

Speaking of el cheapo alternatives to upmarket processors: this plugin from the wonderful Audio Damage.

[Ethereralgreta]

No wonder their stuff was so great.
They must've been soulmates.

[Ethereralgreta]

that is really cool...lovin it!
what bliss!
Now I can copy RG and sound like him, too!
( ) even thought I don't know a lick of guitar....

[Digitar]

Originally Posted by Ethereralgreta

No wonder their stuff was so great.
They must've been soulmates.

Here's what Robin said about his drug days on his weblog.

"I've got a life to run, bills to pay, things to do. I've had periods in my life where I was managed. It was like, “Keep Guthrie in the studio, get him to finish more tracks. If he needs another f-ing kilo of coke, go get it.” Awful.

[Chaellus]

if i had bill gates money id hire liz fraser to sing to me every night before i go to bed....her voice is like a heavenly whisper,, oh and your welcome buddy for the vids i found them on accident...

[Ethereralgreta]

"even if he needs another KILO"? That is a thousand grams and at a street price of around 100 bucks a gram in the 80's, that was alot of dope...holy smokes....it is a wonder the dude is still alive if he did that much.....his heart would give out! A gram would have you climbing the walls......
Man, I always thought they were an 'ecstasy' group to be sure.
I can identify with RG's feeling. It was the 80's, and there was a hell-0-lot o' Coke flowin back then. Here in California it was everywhere, now that I can remember , being we were the main import pipe comin up from South America, via Mexico.
That stuff was evil. It made you feel great for 5 mins, then 5 hours of feeling like death warmed over. When the initial 5 mins of euphoric 'life-is-just-wonderful' was up, you'd do more just to stay 'normal' or recapture that first 'high', which was never as good as the first bit. What an anti-social drug, too. You'd get like Gollum, all 'precious' over the stuff, hiding away in bathrooms just so it could be 'mine, mine, all mine!' Just miserable.
You'd eventually do all you had in your possession until you either tweaked and ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, paranoid as hell, or, after like two days, drink yourself to sleep with a bottle of booze and some sleeping pills....a horrible existence...made your heart pound and you'd sweat like a pig.....The stuff was highly psychologically addictive (thankfully, not physically) from the get go and expensive as hell, too....blow your wad before the end of the gigging weekendtutt......God, am I am glad those days are behind me, too. I actually haven't had to sell a bit of kit cause I spend the rent money on the 'white line highway', in over 20 years. Phew, brought back bad memories there, for a sec.

I remember Nancy Reagan and her 'Just say No' to drugs campaign and how we all laughed our asses off while the CIA was importing it via Jed Bush and his boys, laundering it for cash through the mafia who took their cut, then Oliver North and his boys took the rest of the cash and bought arms from the Iranians to support the Contra Rebels in El Salvador. Boy, how times have changed.
Glad those days are gone and now it is just AIG and Wall street corporate thieves driving our housing prices into the grand that we have to worry about, sans the drug importation.
Ain't America great?
Well, maybe not America, but sobriety is great and at least the only thing I am 'High' on, is life and music, now.

[Ethereralgreta]

Budd and Guthrie at the
SF Soundworks while recording 'Before the Day Breaks' and 'After the Night Falls'.
'Seven Thousand Sunny Years' and 'Turn Off the Sun'
http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/medi...SIN=B0012X4ETW
are probably two of the all time greatest 'ambient' songs, ever written.
The reverb on the the tails of the guitars are so deep and lush you can swim through them like a mermaid does Atlantis. Simply beautiful sound.

makes you wonder what kit they are using, there.

[Space Station]

I recorded at September Sound in Richmond a couple of times. The PCM70 and Eventide SP2016 were big favourites. Robin also mentioned using 10 yamaha delay boxes at once to create reverbs.

[Ethereralgreta]

I used to have the Memorymoog plus with MIDI, which it received in omni mode and I had to filter to get it to receive on one channel.
You talking about Richmond Upon Thames?
I used to live on Queens way, in Richmond. Last stop on the District Line tube. small world. Never knew September Sound was in Richmond.

[Digitar]

September Sound was originally Pete Townsends Eel Pie Studios but the Cocteaus bought it from him. It ended up with three different studios before they closed it down. Robin said they had to have it 85% booked just to pay the bills.

Space Station did you get to go into Robin's big Cupboard with all of his effects pedals. I heard he has a few hundred nice pieces.

[Ethereralgreta]

Going to check this unit out tomorrow in SF. guy will take $900 for it.
I imagine it could make a radio shack single oscillator Radio Shack shite-synth sound the bomb, but I don't want to go in with any preconceived ideas about its capabilities based off of music I like by people that use the same gear. Then again, it wouldn't be there first time any of us bought a piece of gear based off artists we like using the same crap, hence the reason for 'celebrity endorsement' in the press rags adverts.
I hear the Eventide H3000 is hard as hell to program, but dunno? Digitar, any thoughts? I just hope it has some decent grand scale verbs with tails that drift on forever into chroused out bliss from the get-go, and it will be worth the cash, IMHO. I often don't dig too far beyond the presets cause, IMHO, like the internet being a song writing killer, tweaking too long detracts from the song writing process, again IMHO. Everyone has their working methodology, I guess but it is often very easy to get caught up into ' gear slutishness' and not feel the music's 'love vibe'.
I simply just can't afford the H8000FW at this point and am not quite sure on the Eclipse, get mixed responses, so if the Eventide H3000 SX has some color and deepness, it just might fit the bill.
Digitar says he loves his, so maybe I might just buy it and try to 'fake' the RG 'funk'.

[Digitar]

Originally Posted by Ethereralgreta

Going to check this unit out tomorrow in SF. guy will take $900 for it.
I imagine it could make a radio shack single oscillator Radio Shack shite-synth sound the bomb, but I don't want to go in with any preconceived ideas about its capabilities based off of music I like by people that use the same gear. Then again, it wouldn't be there first time any of us bought a piece of gear based off artists we like using the same crap, hence the reason for 'celebrity endorsement' in the press rags adverts.
I hear the Eventide H3000 is hard as hell to program, but dunno? Digitar, any thoughts? I just hope it has some decent grand scale verbs with tails that drift on forever into chroused out bliss from the get-go, and it will be worth the cash, IMHO. I often don't dig too far beyond the presets cause, IMHO, like the internet being a song writing killer, tweaking too long detracts from the song writing process, again IMHO. Everyone has their working methodology, I guess but it is often very easy to get caught up into ' gear slutishness' and not feel the music's 'love vibe'.
I simply just can't afford the H8000FW at this point and am not quite sure on the Eclipse, get mixed responses, so if the Eventide H3000 SX has some color and deepness, it just might fit the bill.
Digitar says he loves his, so maybe I might just buy it and try to 'fake' the RG 'funk'.

It is a deep machine if you want to go there, just make sure you get the manual. But, you can do a lot with just the soft keys and the jog wheel on the presets. It's just got a certain color to the sound that IMHO even the new ones don't have. Don't worry you'll enjoy the H3000, I just wish it had the band delays, then you could definitely take it into Cocteauland. Like I mentioned earlier RG uses Mod Delay alot.

I've never gotten to play around with an Eclipse other than trying it. But, I'll bet your Lexicon has plenty of cocteau sounds in it. It just takes hours and hours of exploring to get something new. I like starting from scratch only if have a certain sound that I'm going for. You can spend days chasing your tail with any processor when you're going for something unique. Me, I write the song first and then use the processing to color it as much or as little as needed.
Ethereralgreta, have fun.

[Animus]

Ah the Cocteau Twins. Brings back memories of my 4AD days in the 80's and 90's. I was a huge Dead Can Dance fan too, still am. VictoriaLand and BlueBellKnoll are my favs. The production on their last album Milk and Kisses was fantastic. Too bad 4ad has gone down hill. Most of the stuff they are releasing nowadays sucks.

[Digitar]

Here's Robin with his H3000

[fuzzjunkie]

you can approximate a lot of 'Twins sounds with the old Roland GP-16. I don't know how much Robin might have used it for himself, but he did use it when he recorded Lush. Programmed sounds for both guitars. Most of the time he was doubling two modulations of some sort with a short delay and long delay emulating reverb.

you can combine:
short delay...phase/flange/chorus...multi-tap delay... hall reverb.
slow phase...fast dimension-d...short delay...multi-tap delay.
compressor...fast flange...slow dimension-d...panning delay.
tremelo...slow lfo shifted pitch detune...slap back echo...plate reverb.
lfo filter band sweeps...short delay...long delay...tremelo.

well, you get the idea...16 Boss pedals you can configure in a multitude of ways...just toss all the hair metal presets aside!

without heavy editing the "analog section" (compressor, filter eq, overdive/distortion) sucks for real analog pedal tone, but does quite well for the fuzzy, sustainy straight into the board 'Twins overdrive sound. Just pick the Overdrive and add a bit of compressor after and EQ to make it sound a bit like a Big Muff and you're just about there! Or put a Big Muff, Poly Chorus, Electric Mistress and either Memmoryman Deluxe or Space Echo in a row like he did in the early days.

[Ethereralgreta]

Well, just went over and placed half down on my H3000 D/SX and ran through some of the presets with the guy. I'd have to say, it beats the snot out of 'plugs' in a New York minute. I saw like 900 presets in this thing. It would take forever to get through them all.
Still, I love some of resonance and atmospheric tonalities coming out of the thing. 163-Cystal Echo 2 reverse shift is sweet in a shimmering way, while some of the others like 278-Flutterous Room stereo Shift...just had a kind of ominous microtuning ambience that had melancholy written all over it. 308-Canyon Reverb Factory is absolutely huge and beautiful sounding with pads, while 321 Hellverb was very cool, eerie in the way you could feedback the delays then pitch shift them...it was intense!. I can see why Robin Guthrie would want to use this on his guitar sound. you could do away with your pedal effects and just go to your preset with a midi program change foot switch..easy really. You'd do your heavy editing to get your sound right, back home, before the gig. Then, you could name your preset to the title of the song you would play, and it'd be easy as Shoe-Fly Pie on stage


Eventide definitely has a color all its own that is NOT Lexicon by any stretch of the imagination. The thing is deep, but I found that it was very easy to use. I am old school, anyway so where the 'hard to program' bit came in from someone, is beyond me. I love the way you can preassign any specific parameters to the front panel quick edit pushbuttons and then tweak to your hearts desire. This is one $900 dollar box I think I will keep for a very very long time. I also got the manual with the unit, so if anyone needs a pdf copy of it, I'll scan it and send it along. Just PM me.
On the down note its XLR I/O but I can live with that.
I'm gonna have alot of fun with this baby. Parameters are even midi syncable.

[Tubthumper]

Great choice. Can I ask what you paid?

edit: sorry, found it.

[Space Station]

The thing is Robin used nearly every effect and reverb processor known. However there is a lot of fender XII on tracks and Bass VI. He also used the Boss Dimension C pedal and the MXR flanger. Play an XII through one of those pedals with plenty of reverb/delay...it's instant Cocteau.

[Digitar]

Originally Posted by Ethereralgreta

I'm gonna have alot of fun with this baby.

Yes, some serious fun.

[Ethereralgreta]

I realize that RG has used many, many effects and in all honesty, I am not really trying to emulate his sound in any way shape or form but more to achieve a certain atmospheric ambiance that was created with his pads when he got together with Harold Budd and did about three albums, Before the Day Breaks, After the Night Falls and the soundtrack to the indie film Mysterious Skin. I am a down tempo electronica composer and don't know how to play guitar, at all, so it would never be my intention of trying to emulate anything he has done or even try to sound like him or anyone else, for that matter. My sound is nothing like the CT's nor does it even have any Guthrie-esque guitar in it, whatsoever. Still, in music comparisons are always inevitable, but they say that being a copy cat is the greatest form of flattery to those being copied but even a greater form of disregard is held for those doing the copying.
So, it is my point that none of us here on this post should intentionally try to emulate the sound of someone else, and unfortunately, if you use a certain style of chorus, reverb, delay and whatnot, and play a few chords, in a certain way, you are going to get thrown into the CT/Robin Guthrie Copy Cat bag . Plus, to even sound like him, you'd have to be able to write great songs and have a keen sense of melody to boot, which is all his. So, try to be original, and if you notice you sound like Robin Guthrie, do a 'check yaself B4 ya Wreck yaself' assessment because once you do so:

1) Those who know will say "Hey, sounds like Cocteau Twins, what a copy cat!

2. You immediately get typecast and no one will take anything else you do, seriously.

3. You get to walk around being viewed as a stuck in the 80's 'non-innovator'

I know I am going to piss alot of people off when I say this, and bear in mind, it is purely opinion and observence, but no one here in the USA would end up sounding like Robin Guthrie, because in general, most people, even musicians I have talked to, don't know who he is. Now, that being said, the few lucky ones of us left would probably not, at least publicly, try to sound like him unless we were in a cover band trying to cover a song at a bar (of which NO ONE at a bar here in the USA, outside a major city on the coasts, would really want to hear a Cocteau Twins song live, honestly because most have never heard of them). Not to discredit CT in any way, but their music isn't suited for most White Anglo Saxon Protestant Jack Danials drinkers. once you kick in the intro to Pandora Their heads will roll in a lull and they'll just end up getting dizzy then puke when their eyes roll back in hypnotica. Either that, or they'll get meaner and start fights. Now, ZZ top, Hank Williams Jr, Muddy Waters, now we are talkin WASP bar music. Gets the girlz on the dancefloor and the guys unbuttoning their lumberjack shirts. Now, the R&B crowd? Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan, everyone is happy in their little niche of the nightlife. I have a point to all this:
Unfortunately, most Americans could care less about what they hear on the radio or at a bar, or club, as long as its got some kind of rhythm and they have heard it before, on the radio or it has some form of country blues or R&B 4 on the floor MOJO . Save from the bigger cities on the coasts of our great nation here, once night falls, we are mostly a group of drunken war mongering bar room brawler dance club gangstah renegades riding Harleys and most of those folks probably never heard of the Cocteau Twins and if you put on their music, would ask 'What is diz shit?' The most sensitive we get over here on the radio is Fleetwood Mac and Brittney Spears and CT were never a top act on US airwaves by any stretch of the imagination. I was a late comer to their music, around two years ago. Most of my friends, unless they are really into them (of which I know NONE, zero nada), complain that all their tunes sound "the same". CT never Had a top 50 song in our charts (at least the Simple Minds and Human League, did but most British acts, don't ever see a top hit in our country) and the biggest they ever became was Heaven or Las Vegas which garnered no hits that I can recall. I cannot vouch for their status, elsewhere. So, unless you are at a New Wave goth or 80's dance club in a city, you'd never hear someone playing a CT song live..and even then..dance clubs here have only DJ's. So in this, there would be no point in trying to emulate CT's sound, unless you were practicing for yourself or you are a kid trying to be cool at the high school dance. No one else would really care what your doing, know what your doing or actually like what you are doing, once you started doing it.
The CT's were great, true innovators, deserve far more credit than they ever received, but as far as marketability, sometimes you can innovate yourself right out of a paycheck. In American, at least, I think their time has come and gone, sadly. Their 'chorus-y' bass lines have an uncanny resemblance to a lot of New Order from back in the day, which unfortunately places them smack dab in the middle of 1988, on a retro-sonic New Wave scale. Most people in America, here that stuff on retro night, if at all. Still, RG's newer stuff and some other work though, with Budd, like the Ghost has no Name, is timeless and I believe it will take years for the masses to truly appreciate what it is, exactly, if ever in our lifetime.

Time will tell, but I think it behooves all of us, to sound original, and not worry so much trying to sound like our favorite artists as we progress in our musical lives, but more so try to take inspiration from what their music gave us emotionally, in order that we can become our own musical entities that others will appreciate and that some kid, someday will try to emulate as he or she tries to find their own, musical identity.

[Digitar]

Originally Posted by Ethereralgreta

1) Once you do so, those who know will say "hey, sounds like Cocteau Twins, what a copy cat!

2. You immediately get typecast as a copycat and no one will take anything else you do, seriously.

3. You get to walk around being viewed as a stuck in the 80's 'non innovator'

The old line "giving a man a Les Paul will not make him Les Paul", comes to mind anytime I hear something like this. No matter how hard any of us would try to emulate someones style, it's always an exercise in futilty. But ALL musicians are influenced by something or somebody. Just because everybody has a chorus, delay or reverb doesn't mean they are going to sound like RG. It's all about how you use your own musical journey to move forward.

Eric Clapton started out by taking the licks from all of his blues heroes and piecing them together in his own way. He said in an interview that He would play a BB king lick moving on to a robert johnson lick to a albert king lick and the only thing that was him were the transitions between the licks. When you find someone that inspires you, it makes you look at your own playing in a new and insightful way.

If getting hung up on a style and using it makes you an imitator and not respected, that is definitely not what I've found in this business. You will have innovators that come along like Bill Monroe(Bluegrass), Chuck Berry(Rock'N'Roll), Bob Marley(Reggae), Pink Floyd(Progressive), Black Sabbath(Heavy Metal), Sex Pistols(Punk), Cocteau Twins(Shoegazer/Dream Pop) among many others. The point is when you are a true innovator you start a movement among musicians who all react to the excitement of this new way of thinking. And they all start using the tools that they already have. If being an imitator was truly not accepted then rock and roll would of died because Chuck Berry would've owned it all.

The sounds that RG and HB used on their new records are the exact same sounds that they used on their old records only with new processors and different song approaches. The Record That they made together with the Cocteaus in the 80s, "the moon and the melodies" was very much in the same arena as the new ones that you're asking about the sounds of.

Robin has commented about a reviewer complaining that he still sounded like the Cocteaus. And his response was that's how I play. Robin has talked about where he took his ideas from when he got started, does that make him an imitator? If you wanted to take it to the logical conclusion then the Cocteaus sound like U2 because they both use the same processors, and then Coldplay sounds like both of them. It's pointless.

The idea is to draw inspiration from every arena that inspires you because even the innovators had their heroes too. Now stop worrying about who you're going to sound like and go have fun with that H3000. And that's the point

[Ethereralgreta]

Digitar, you da man!

[Ethereralgreta]

saw a guitarist use one of these last night and he started layering loops with it...simply gorgeous sounding through chorus and synth pads.
One is for sale on eBay right now. I might snatch it up and run my synths through it.
Electrix Repeater loop transport - eBay (item 180344005988 end time Apr-06-09 19:58:30 PDT)

[Digitar]

Originally Posted by Ethereralgreta

saw a guitarist use one of these last night and he started layering loops with it...simply gorgeous sounding through chorus and synth pads.
One is for sale on eBay right now. I might snatch it up and run my synths through it.
Electrix Repeater loop transport - eBay (item 180344005988 end time Apr-06-09 19:58:30 PDT)

In the session picture that you posted right by the headstock of the guitar, you'll see one of those. I've been thinking of picking up one of those too, but so far my JamMan's doing a good job. The difference is, I think the Repeater is stereo.

[Animus]

Originally Posted by Ethereralgreta

Well, just went over and placed half down on my H3000 D/SX and ran through some of the presets with the guy. I'd have to say, it beats the snot out of 'plugs' in a New York minute. I saw like 900 presets in this thing. It would take forever to get through them all.
Still, I love some of resonance and atmospheric tonalities coming out of the thing. 163-Cystal Echo 2 reverse shift is sweet in a shimmering way, while some of the others like 278-Flutterous Room stereo Shift...just had a kind of ominous microtuning ambience that had melancholy written all over it. 308-Canyon Reverb Factory is absolutely huge and beautiful sounding with pads, while 321 Hellverb was very cool, eerie in the way you could feedback the delays then pitch shift them...it was intense!. I can see why Robin Guthrie would want to use this on his guitar sound. you could do away with your pedal effects and just go to your preset with a midi program change foot switch..easy really. You'd do your heavy editing to get your sound right, back home, before the gig. Then, you could name your preset to the title of the song you would play, and it'd be easy as Shoe-Fly Pie on stage


Eventide definitely has a color all its own that is NOT Lexicon by any stretch of the imagination. The thing is deep, but I found that it was very easy to use. I am old school, anyway so where the 'hard to program' bit came in from someone, is beyond me. I love the way you can preassign any specific parameters to the front panel quick edit pushbuttons and then tweak to your hearts desire. This is one $900 dollar box I think I will keep for a very very long time. I also got the manual with the unit, so if anyone needs a pdf copy of it, I'll scan it and send it along. Just PM me.
On the down note its XLR I/O but I can live with that.
I'm gonna have alot of fun with this baby. Parameters are even midi syncable.

+1 I just got a DSP4000 I am in proverbial heaven. I want to get the H800FW eventually but thats the gearslut in me.

[Ethereralgreta]

http://www.eventide.com/AudioDivision/Products/Harmonizers/~/media/Files/Product%20multimedia/H8000FW%20audio/h8kdemo.ashx

[Ethereralgreta]

I made my final payment on this baby yesterday.
Racked her up and Aux'd her into the Ghost24Le. I am a happy dude.
I feel like 'Gollum' with it sitting in its own little special rack space, all precious, .

Digitar, I noticed my 500 and 600 presets are missing on this unit.
Is it supposed to be that way? The manual shows them to be missing on the D S/X model, too. So, my question here is:
1) Which model had more presets?
2) Which model was considered the higher end model, D/SX or D S/E?
3) Is there a way I can get those missing presets with a ROM upgrade?
4) Who has the ROM upgrades?

Oh, got an email from RG on our Myspace page. I had to get kind of rude and personal to get a response out of him, (and feel a bad for doing so-shame on me) but it worked and I got a reply. Hope he won't mind my quoting his comments about his gear usage here, but I thought it would be beneficial to all of you guys, so I went the extra mile for ya's. He is what he replied about his effects usage of late:

"Gregory....I wanted to share with you my experience with the eventide as you asked. I don't use protools so don't own the anthology, however I did use it on a track called flicker and was very impressed. I don't see me changing recording mediums in order to take advantage of the card though*. I have a couple of aging h3000's which I adore but am scared of, as they have freaked out on too many occasions, usually in front of an audience. So recently I got an eclipse which is delightful but sounds rather different to an h3000. I'd recommend it highly though as programming it is pretty easy (once you have read the manual about the algorithms) and the capacity of what it can do far exceeds any of the others, including possibly the anthology. Having said all that I've not used it on any recordings yet, I'm still discovering how to make it sound correct for my live work. I think it's about $2k, which is no small amount of cash but I think you get what you pay for ....
Hope that helps, gotta run"
x robin

* side note-I will assume what Robin was referring to when saying 'taking advantage of the card' is that he is talking about having to switch from his Cubase to Protools in order to use the Eventide Anthology II plug ins, being they are usable only within a Protools TDM environment. This means, to use the Eventide Anthology plugs, you need the DSP power of the TDM HD 1 cards from Digidesign, since you have to have the cards installed in the PCI-e slots of your puter to get their added DSP power to use the Anthology plugs. So, unless you are running a PT HD-1, 2 or 3 rig (the lower end host base Protools systems like LE and the firewire based PT systems, will not work) You cannot use Anthology II plugs, they have no VST or AU versions. I emailed Eventide tech support on this, and they replied their 'Engineers are considering this option'. That being said, if you want the eventide sound and you are not running Protools, it is their hardware only at this point.