I might need to practice a bit, I'll get back to you...
Well just in case you don't think you're 'there yet' & able to copy Leslie West, read what he had to say about himself as a guitar player back in the early days!
Gibson: “Mississippi Queen” has one of rock and roll’s all-time great guitar riffs. Do you think writing great riffs is a dying art?
LW: I don’t know. I can only talk about my own style. I play the guitar with only my first and fourth fingers, on my left hand. I never learned to use all my fingers, like you would playing a scale. What I try to do is play to my strengths. I can’t play fast, so I try to play slow and melodic. I focused on my vibrato and my tone. I used to work every day on the tone of the guitar. I wanted [his guitar] to sound like Pavarotti. I wanted that tremolo, that vibrato.”I remember someone telling me that “less is more.” In Alfred Hitchcock films the music is really intense, but then there will be this dead silence. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but that silence is deafening. I try to play around with dynamics in a similar way.
Gotta love Leslie.
Of course, Leslie’s axe of choice back in the day was a Les Paul Junior, TV models first. In a House of Blues interview, he said: “To me a Les Paul Junior is a tree with a microphone.” And “there’s a hum to it [because of the P-90 pickup], but I managed to hide the hum.”
So that was it: Les Paul Junior (mahogany + P-90), cord, Sunn Coliseum head, Marshall cabs. No fuzz, no effects of any sort.
And fingers. Fingers full of attitude and conviction.
If your looking for "THAT'' sound, you need this too.
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Yes it was a shear stroke pf luck that Leslie copped that sound & even ended up using a Sunn Coliseum PA head!
Gibson: Mountain made its performance debut in 1969, at Fillmore West. Do you remember much about that?
LW: Yes, I do. I remember that Albert King’s amplifiers blew, and he had to use my amps. It was funny. I was supposed to get these Marshall amps, and they didn’t arrive, so Sunn had sent me some amps. I was pissed off when I got them because it was actually a Coliseum PA head they sent me. I thought, “poop, what am going to do with this?” I had no choice but to use them, but it turned out that they gave me the signature sound that I used for years. [Coliseum PA heads] had four microphone inputs and a master volume, which sort of turned into what amps are now. You could get a particular distortion by plugging in the microphones and turning up the master volume. It was a mistake that proved to be great. Nobody else knew how I was getting that sound.
Anyway....
Here's Mississippi Queen from the original studio album.
