The Fixx - 'One Thing Leads To Another'

[sprinkleeninow]

[ProfessorGAC]

1. Covered This For 20+ Years

I am a huge fan of The Fixx. I was a fan even before Reach The Beach.
Saw them twice, once in a 1,200 seat room.
They made an offer that if we bought merch above a certain amount, we got to stay after the show and meet the band.
I bought my wife a Calm Animals sweatshirt & I got to talk to all five of them.
Over the years, we covered at least 10 of their songs.
Like I said, huge fan!

[sprinkleeninow]

2. What cool reminiscing!

[keep_left]

3. They made many converts among the musically talented, even...

... snooty prog-rock "musos". For example, Joe Satriani is a big fan of Jamie West-Oram's playing. And the Fixx definitely set the standard when it came to that super-clean '80s guitar tone: active Strat pickups, brickwall compression, Dimension D stereo chorus, and tons of delay/reverb. West-Oram was also featured on a bunch of records produced by Rupert Hine (e.g. Tina Turner, the Thompson Twins).

I found West-Oram's playing to be quite liberating as well; as a young musician in the '80s, I saw the keyboard synthesizers starting to dominate so much music, and those Fixx records (as well as Alex Lifeson's playing with Rush) showed a way that guitarists could still cut through even when pitted against literal walls of keyboards.

[ProfessorGAC]

4. I'm Not A Big Pedal Guy, But....

...I bought a Boss acoustic guitar simulator pedal just to dial in the EQ to get my guitar to sound like JWO's.
I mostly played keyboards, but when I did play guitar I wanted it to sound VERY different than the other guy's guitar.
So my clean was cleaner & my high gain was denser. And my points of reference were JWO or Andy Summers.

[keep_left]

5. You've mentioned that Boss pedal before. IIRC, it's discontinued...

...but I need to get one of those off Ebay or whatever. It sounds like a game-changer when it comes to getting that super-clean '80s tone. Another key is extreme compression--using a compressor/limiter like an effect. You hear it all over '80s records, where the guitar has been brickwall compressed (like a 20:1 compression ratio). A really clean amp helps to get that near-DI tone (I've used a Roland JC-120, which I replaced with the solid-state channel from the ADA MP-1).

You can get some of these sounds with pedals, but I have a feeling that at least a few of JWO's tones came from going DI to the board and using a lot of outboard gear. IIRC, JWO used a rack-mounted (studio) compressor, the Valley People Dyna-Mite, which is notorious for its extreme compression sounds. Some of the other parts of JWOs tone are probably studio outboard gear in racks: Roland Dimension D, lots of expensive delay/reverbs by Lexicon, AMS, etc.

BTW, in the late '80s and '90s, Roland made a Boss pedal called the Dimension C. They re-released it a couple years ago after they sued Behringer for their knockoff version, which was very popular ( the "Chorus Space C" ).

[ProfessorGAC]

6. I Remember That Pedal

Never had one, but they were all the rage.