I second this wholeheartedly.I have heard many a recording of theirs in their early days and their sound is more born out of their live shows than anything else.

Apparently feedback sampled and then played back when the track was being recorded. (This comes from The Wire's book Invisible Jukebox)

Huh. I thought that was the scoop with Loveless; didn't hear that about Psychocandy.
Thanks, sonicl.

There certainly was some sort of rough technique at work in the studio but their sound was mainly concieved in their live playing.

In Loveless,Kevin Shields started experimenting with layers of sounds to the extreme(one of the songs has something like 30 layers of guitar on top of it) but you can clearly hear that that couldn't be said for 'Isnt Anything'(where i think disjointed dynamics play more of a part in the incredible charm of this album).

They used 60's fuzzes. I think the shinei fuzz was the one Jim liked. A lot of companies like univox made clones of the shinei fuzz. I'm not sure if they still make them, but the schematics are online in alot of places. I don't know what other effects they used.

It sounds on some of their songs like they are blending a ring mod on a high octave type setting into a fuzz sound to get a really sick fuzz with a feedbackish quality to it.

I've been told that some of the sounds they have got have been made with contact mics and stuff. A friend told me that the feedback on Never Understand was a broken air conditioner, but he could have been shitting me, he likes to do that to people.

A lot of it was playing with amps I believe. Playing with multiple amps, damaging them, etc. They used hollow bodies as well as old surf guitars because they didn't like to have a lot of sustain. Hollowbodies and old surf guitars like tiescos have really shitty single coils. With humbuckers, you can practically face an amp and if you are playing rhythm, not much feedback will come out except when you stop playing. With hollow-bodies and crappy surf guitars I've found that you can create interesting melodies over the rhythm. I would assume they did similar sort of stuff.

Usually if I want to play JAMC tunes, I'll use my stereo effects so I can plug several effects in. I'll have a loud good sounding amp set to a normal setting and have 1 or 2 crappy little solid states cranked up. I have a crappy johnson closed back 15 watt with an 8 inch speaker, and it sounds like ass. I like to plug the effect out of an effect into that and the clean out into my Squier Champ (my practice amp). That way I can get a pulsating buzzsaw chorus in one amp and a classic blues dirty sound on the other amp with some reverb.

Using multiple amps you create different fuzz tones that blend in interesting ways.

Unfortunately, it is fun to do at home, but a bitch to set up live. I like the 2 amp sound for my music better, partially because of my experimenting when I was kicking out the jams to Never Understand and Taste of Cindy
and finding some really cool tones I could use later. I only use 1 amp live, but hopefully I'll change that soon, especially since I have a song where I use ring mod feedback over rhythm at the end, which requires me to change to a shitty guitar and use a 15W amp on a stand.

That is another album that uses quite a bit of amp experimenting. Apparently Kevin Shields liked to do stuff like face two amps together and put the mics in between.

A lot of what the Reid brothers and Kevin Shields did in the studio was sort of a natural extention of stuff that Jimmy Page started to explore with Led Zeppelin.

The only difference being that in Shields's case it was more of a pre-meditated thing while in the Reid brothers's case it was a more spontaneous and care-free thing.There is nothing wrong in that at all.If you look at the way a lot of bands were deemed on the british press at that time,the 'Jesus and Mary Chain-alike' or 'Noise pop' tag was applied left,right and centre on a lot of bands(The Smiths thing is another story).When they first started out as a band,My Bloody Valentine were one of them.I admire Shields's genius in that he soon realized that the formula had to move forward in order to flourish in a more creative way.And he did so with style and grace.

See Im thinking of similar stuff, I just think some of that feedback is not guitar produced noise...

check this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVa7piBqPW8&search=the%20jesus%20and%20mar y%20chain

it looks like there all using hollowbodies.

When Im trying to play a JMC song I use my one guitar, a 60's St. George shitty Japanese guitar with two bad single coils, I then put on the overdrive, contour it a bit and add a lot of reverb. It sounds pretty good....

and it seems like they liked sustain considering they used alot of reverb and distortion as well as hollowbodies....

William Reid's Sonic Sacrilege
James Rotondi / Guitar Player
07.1992
"If there was a boat sinking, and it was me and you," muses guitarist/songwriter William Reid, "and we were friends, having a drink, but there was only one place [in a lifeboat] left, we would scratch each other's eyes out, rip each other's throats open to get there." Reid doesn't say this menacingly. It's his way of shedding light on human nature--kind when safe, vicious when cornered. He and his brother Jim's band, the Jesus and Mary Chain, could be seen the same way. Their dark, brooding music, a combination of buoyant pop songcraft and blistering feedback shriek, has earned them as much condemnation as critical praise. When I speak to Reid, he seems every bit the thoughtful lad from East Kilbride, Scotland. But pushed to defend themselves, the Chain's reputation is for scathing attacks on sacred cows, and their sensually disturbing lyrics, like this one from the new album Honey's Dead

Reid was inspired by the music and attitudes of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and the punk movement, bands who proved to him that "you didn't need to be a great technician to make a record or to play guitar. You didn't need to be Eric Clapton to play. You can just pick it up, and as long as you've got an imagination, you can do okay." Reid's playing, captured on earlier albums Psychocandy, Darklands, and Automatic, is still the sort that can elicit groans from more technical-minded players, but there's no denying the intensity of his attack.

Running his Gibson 330 semi-acoustic through any number of fuzz boxes, Reid manipulates feedback with the use of vibrato, toggle switches, and sheer proximity to his Marshall 50-watt amps. Sizzling high-frequency feedback accompanies the clean major-to-minor rhythm changes in "Almost Gold," while gradual wah-wah waves open and close the chord textures on "Teenage Lust," in which sounds like pebbles falling through a steel pipe break apart in a jagged clipping. At times the barrage, a screaming match between amp and guitar, occurs almost without William's interference; he's often walked offstage to let his carefully placed instrument finish the set
for him.

But here's the rub: The songs aren't written that way. It's not as if the Reids make a lot of noise, yell a bit, and call it a tune. "If a song doesn't sound good on acoustic guitar, it gets thrown in the dump. That's the way we've always done it," explains William. "People are always
surprised by that. It's easy to make noise, but not to write a good song. Playing an electric guitar, you can get fooled; playing chords that you think are powerful just because they're loud, and that what you're singing is somehow a powerful song, when it's not really the case."

And with all that dynamic response and microphone-shredding tone, he must have those amps cranked, right? "Not really," says Reid. "In the studio we're not loud at all, and on stage I wouldn't say we're real loud. Good guitar sound comes from tone, not volume. Volume is something that only impresses you if you're in the room. If you turn the amp way up and stand in front of it, that feels good. But when it's going through hi-fi speakers, it doesn't feel as good. So you've got to start with a good sound."

In the studio, Reid likes to hook up his MESA/Boogie and Fender Twin Reverb alongside his Marshall, running one guitar through them all simultaneously, then sending each amp to a different channel, to be blended in the mix. He likes his semi-acoustic Gibson for "the dynamics. What I don't like about solidbodies is that you don't get a lot of dynamics when playing rhythm," he suggests. "It seems to be really compressed and sustainy. Whereas with this guitar, even if you were to put it through five fuzz pedals, you can still hear a jangle, a crispness."

The crisp edge and dangerous aura around the group's efforts is not easily won. Reid admits to being a bit overwhelmed by the creative and personal demands of the rock business, and he harbors some trepidation towards the whole recording process. "Ideas can drain you, and writing songs really leaves me shot sometimes. Especially when you don't know if what you're doing is good. You can't tell until all the components are in place. Somewhere near the end you start thinking it's going good, and it's a relief. But at the beginning, it's that blank page. That scares the shit out of me." [Def American], can be land mines of controversy: "I wanna die just like JFK, I wanna die in the USA."

Describing the guitar as a tool is perfectly appropriate to Jim's own approach to the instrument - at early gigs he wore a cheap Gibson copy around his neck like a fashion accessory, plugged in just to add to the general din of feedback. "I do play guitar sometimes also on this record," Jim laughs, "but I don't want to call myself a musician. In the studio we are not that hung up on who does what. Just whoever can do it best, so often the guitar gets handed around. We just don't have very defined roles. Basically we know what we want and we'll just do whatever it takes to get there. It's not unheard of to pass the guitar to the studio engineer and say 'Can you do it'?"

Reluctant guitarist William is currently using a distinctive guitar. Ben takes up the story: "He's got a Gibson 330 - it's got 'William' written on it. It's actually, technically, Jim's, but I don't think that he's ever gonna get it back. I know we used others, but this guitar is almost the only one on the album. It always sounds good and it's easy to play. In fact we rented a lot of old guitars just to try something different, but the Gibson 330 just sounded better."

Another distinctive part of the Jesus and Mary Chain sound comes from old, knackered fuzz pedals. One that made a sound like an air-raid siren was a particular feature at early gigs. "There's an old 70s black fuzz box pedal that we used a lot, a Japanesse thing but they don't make them anymore. That was the entire sound of Psychocandy," replies Jim. "Now, a lot of the sound we'll just get from the amps. A lot of the fuzz bass, comes from turning the Ampeg up to 10, which gives great distortion. You can't hear what you are doing, cause it's too loud, but if you put it in a different room, you can feel it off the floor, and it just sounds great on tape. But on stage I tend to end up with a lot of different pedals, in order to get the different sounds quicker and easier."

Lots of volume, feedback and lsd.

That's all you ever really need.

cool clip, too bad the sound quality is kind of shitty, at least I can still hear the feedback

Psycho candy is a kickass album by the way!

Has anyone read the book that was released last year, Psychotic Chain Reaction? I'd probably like to get it, even though it's pretty short.

As for noise, I think Upside Down that's on Barbed Wire Kisses comp has one of the most severe in yr face kind of attitude that's ever been integrated with catchy pop hooks. The wall of feedback in that one just completely over the top. My fave song of that record.

Diesel is the very spirit of Psychocandy re-incarnated into an alcoholic kid.Not sure about some of the people who are writing above though.

fucking brilliant band-saw jamc live a couple of months before they broke up in dublin. it was amazing but very short! think they played for 45 mins to an hour! one of my top 5 bands psychcandy is a great album

jamc is one of the greatest bands ever..
i remember being soooo smug when in an interview the yoof commented on them being contemporary favorites.. would love to hear an SY cover of "psychocandy" or "blues from a gun"...

My radio station has the Upside Down 7" with Vegetable Man on it.

JaMC Feedback
1. Battered guitars, old loud pickups
2. Amps turned to 10
3. Stand really close
4. Move about a bit
5. Drain blood from ears after every other song

For some wild feedback do what everyone else has said such as standing close to the amplifier with your guitar etc. and then grab your microphone and stick it next to the amp. It gives you that really piercing, shrieking noise and you'll have every ear in the room bleeding with that one. ;)

thanks but I was actually talking about a particular noise, the fuzzy static feedback found in their songs, and I have already been enlightened that they used old fuzz boxes with feedback....;)

I have an old sears amp with a ripped speaker that makes radioish fuzz. It doesn't get all that loud, but it would be beautiful mic'd. I gotta start using that amp.

You can get crappy practice amps ridiculously cheap off of craigslist and such.