Different Circles

They went to the composition room and hauled the amplifier, the speaker, the talk box, the microphone stand, the various cords and cables, and Jake’s sunburst Les Paul guitar back to the entertainment room. This took about ten minutes to accomplish. Hooking everything up took another ten. G then sat down on the couch across from Jake, near the speaker, and Jake sat down in a chair. He quickly tuned the guitar by ear and then set it up for moderate distortion. He played out a few riffs and a brief solo in order to get into the groove of playing. He then stepped down on the talk box pedal.

“All right,” he told G. “Here goes.”

He put the plastic tube in his mouth and then began to play some simple riffs on the Les Paul. The vibration of the strings was converted to an analog signal by the dual Humbucker pickups on the guitar and then shipped to the amplifier by the guitar cord, where it was distorted and amplified and then sent to the talk box, which was a basic isolation box with a plastic tube coming out of it. The sound traveled through the air inside that plastic tube and was emitted in Jake’s mouth, where he could use his lips, tongue, and jaw to further shape it in a variety of ways. From Jake’s mouth, it went into the microphone and came out the speaker.

He kept his lips, tongue, and jaw in a neutral position at first, so the notes he played came out sounding mostly normal, with just a bit of an echo effect. He played a brief solo and then the riff for Ozzie’s I Don’t Know. From there, he started to use his lips and tongue a bit, transitioning into the main riff for the Eagles’ Those Shoes, followed by the blues stomp from Rocky Mountain Way. He pulled these off pretty well, improving with each repetition he made.

“I like that shit, homey,” G told him enthusiastically. “It’s like Joe Walsh is in the fuckin’ room with us.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jake said modestly (and truthfully), “but I have definitely picked up the basics of the device.”

“Do some Frampton,” Gordon ordered. “That’s the gold standard there—and don’t even try to tell me you haven’t been playing around with Frampton’s shit.”

Jake chuckled. He had actually been about to make that claim. “All right,” he said. “Just don’t expect too much.”

He ran through his Peter Frampton repertoire, starting with Show Me the Way and then moving into the extended talk-box solo from Do You Feel Like We Do? Though he did not have quite the same output dynamic as Frampton had because of differing distortion levels, he was able to duplicate the talking guitar effect reasonably well. From there, he played some other examples of talk box tunes that he had taught himself: Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog, Pink Floyd’s Pigs (Three Different Ones), Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, and Steely Dan’s Haitian Divorce. Finally, he silenced the guitar and removed his mouth from the tube, breathing heavily.

“That was badass!” Gordon declared.

“I guess,” Jake said, taking a deep breath and holding it for a moment. “I always forget to breathe as much as I should when I use this thing. It’s like walking uphill.”

“You have got to find a way to use that thing at the TSF.”

“The TSF?” Jake said, shaking his head. “No way. We’re already pressed for time to work the set up. There’s no way I could work in a completely new tune.”

“I’m not saying you need to come up with an entirely new tune,” G said. “I’m saying that you can find a way to adapt the box into one of your existing tunes that you plan to play anyway. Extend the solo or the bridge or maybe even both on one of the less popular cuts and make it into something new. That’s what Frampton did with Feel, isn’t it?”

“Uh ... yeah, that is my understanding.”

“And the live version of Feel is now Frampton’s most popular track, isn’t it?”

“It’s certainly up there,” Jake had to admit. “Are you suggesting that I could pull something off like Frampton did? Take one of my more marginal tunes and turn it into something new by adding in some talk box.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Gordon said. “You could be this generation’s Peter fucking Frampton.”

“I am nowhere near as skilled with the instrument as Frampton or Walsh or even Sambora. I’m not sure I could pull it off.”

“You may not be as skilled as them, but you’re no slouch either. I think you can do this shit, Jake.”

Jake thought about it for a few seconds. The idea seemed to gain appeal the more thinking he did. “Maybe,” he said at last. “But if I do this, you need to step up as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want a keyboard solo of some kind in the tune as well. And I want to introduce you to the crowd at that point in the show.”

“Introduce me as Bigg G?” he asked. “I don’t really want to go there.”