by Bryan Hillebrandt
In our ongoing series looking at some of the most recognizable guitars and guitar sounds, for the next two installments I’ll be looking at Neil Young and talking a bit about the electric guitar he’s most famous for playing with his band Crazy Horse and also explore a bit about how he gets that distinctive sound. First off, let’s look at that guitar.
Neil Young’s primary electric guitar is known by its nickname “Old Black.” It is most likely a 1953 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop that had a rather inexpensive black paint job applied to it before he acquired it in the late ‘60s that covered the standard gold finish. This legendary guitar has been one of the crucial aspects of Young’s distinctive electric sound throughout his career.
Adding to the legend, there are different stories about where Young found Old Black. Most say that he got it in a trade with Jim Messina for a Gretsch Chet Atkins model (other say he traded a Gretsch White Falcon to Stephen Stills for it).
However it came into his possession, it had been significantly modified by the time he got it. Besides the aforementioned less-than-pro paint job, it also received a new tune-o-matic bridge and a Bigsby vibrato tailpiece. (Tune-o-matic bridges, the type of bridge you can still see on most Les Pauls and Les Paul copies, were first introduced after Old Black was made.)
The Bigsby tremelo is another crucial part of Young’s sound and playing style. If you watch Rust Never Sleeps, the tremelo bar seems to be in his hand constantly during his solos. I once spoke to a guy who worked as a roadie on one of Young’s tours. He said that every time Neil would finish the show with Tonight’s the Night he would end by pulling back hard on the Bigsby and breaking all the strings off Old Black. It was the poor roadie’s job to grab a flashlight, go out on stage, and search for the tiny pieces of the tailpiece that would fly in all directions when the strings popped off. (The same guy told me that Young would buy an extra first-class ticket for Old Black when flying somewhere for a gig.)
There have been many modifications to Old Black since Young acquired it. Early on he had a problem with the stock bridge position P-90 pickup. In an effort to get it working right, he took it to a music shop for repair. The music shop went out of business or moved and the pickup was lost.
Young tried a few different pickups in its place and finally settled on a mini humbucker from a Gibson Firebird. This pickup is another crucial element to his signature sound. The pickup is reported to be highly microphonic—meaning that it acts like a microphone and picks up signals and sounds that a guitar pickup usually wouldn’t. The pickup is so microphonic that on the Ragged Glory tour Young could be seen yelling into this pickup.
Another modification was to add a mini switch that sends the signal from the mini humbucker directly to his amplifier—bypassing Old Black’s volume and tone controls. The theory is that there is some sound loss when the signal from the pickups goes through the volume and tone controls and that going direct gives the sound more presence.
All these modifications to Old Black make Neil Young’s sound instantly recognizable, but it is also his amplification system and effects that help take it to the supersonic level.
Next time we’ll take a look at that.
