Though often an accidental and unwanted byproduct, guitar feedback has widely been accepted as yet another expressive tool that players can add to their arsenal in order to inject their playing with some additional color, flair, or personality.
Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and Pete Townshend are just some of the electric guitar heroes to have adopted feedback as a means to supercharge their performances, as was blues veteran Buddy Guy, who was one of the earliest pioneers of using the noise to his advantage.
However, while players of today may be inspired to channel feedback by watching their heroes online, Guy didn’t have such luxury, and as it turns out, he first stumbled upon the tool entirely by accident.
“In Chicago then, we didn't have stages. We'd always go in a corner and play,” he told NPR. “And they had jukeboxes during their breaks, and they would play tunes. And that's how I learnt, by listening to other people, greats – Muddy Water, Wolf and so on.”
During one fateful gig, though, Guy left the stage with his Strat still plugged in and, having forgotten to turn off his guitar amp after the set, left it vulnerable to passers-by – one of whom would inadvertently influence Guy's approach to the guitar.
“I forgot to turn my guitar off one day and a lady passed by, and her dress tail hit the G string,” Guy continues. “And it just stayed there with distortion for about 20 minutes. And I said, I'll never forget that. And I went up, and it worked with me, and I've been doing it ever since.”
“We were just in the corner playing. And she got up from her table to probably go get a drink or use the bathroom or something like that. And I said, wow, I forgot to cut my guitar off. And it was right in tune with the particular tune what was playing on the jukebox.”
It was a lightbulb moment for Guy, who put this newfound feedback hack into action as soon as he could. From the 1960s onwards, some of Guy’s most impressive feats of soloing – especially his live cuts at Montreux and Austin City Limits – were decorated with tasteful uses of feedback.
“After I found out it would stay and distort that long, I just went up one day and played and stood right there where it was, and it works,” he says.
The select use of feedback and using it to his advantage was only one aspect of Guy's expansive style, though, which would influence everyone from Jimi Hendrix to John Mayer.
