Only Shallow         My Bloody Valentine Production In Depth         PART 1

BAND: My Bloody Valentine
Album: Loveless
Track: Only Shallow



My Bloody Valentine were a basic 4-piece alternative band who had been around since 1984/85 playing fairly standard indie guitar pop. Kevin Shields was the leader of the band and by his own admission, they were copyists of the Jesus and Mary Chain, a band who hailed from East Kilbride and who released their first single on Alan McGee’s Creation records.

 This record label became the most successful and influential on the British alternative music scene in the mid 80’s to 2000 and signed MBV to the label where they released several critically acclaimed EP’S and their first album Isn’t Anything which were also successful.

 This provided the backdrop to where MBV were going to go next with their next album , Loveless. The making of this album was not without it’s problems and took roughly 3 years to make and allegedly cost £250,000 to make although Kevin Shields insists that this figure has been wildly exaggerated.

 Nevertheless, Creation and MBV went their separate ways and MBV  took another 22 years to make another record.

The actual track I am going to analyse is Only Shallow, the first track on Loveless.

 As well as being the leader in MBV , Kevin Shields was keen to produce the record with assistance from engineers when needed. He had a lot of specific and unique ideas for how he wanted to approach the making of the record and wasn’t willing to compromise.

This led to a lot of problems with some of the in house studio engineers who didn’t agree with a lot of these ideas. There are several engineers credited on the album but Shields insists that only 3 or 4 contributed to the creation of the record, we will look at this in more detail later on. In the end, it was Shields specific ideas that defined the sound but it probably wouldn’t have been possible without the technical knowledge of these engineers on the sessions.


ONLY SHALLOW

Only Shallow opens the album and is a heavy guitar orientated track with soft sounding vocals within the mix and a distinctive sound in the loud parts of the track which has been compared to an air-raid siren.

 It is obvious from the start that there is a lot going on in the track and a lot of various processes from sound source through to final processing to arrive at the finished sound.

 Probably the most noticeable part of the track to start with is the prominence of the guitars. Kevin Shields wanted the guitars pushed to the fore front in the mix and to have the vocals mixed at a fairly low level whilst sharing much of the same mid-frequencies as each other.

 The intention is to create a cohesive wall of sound rather than a mix where there is clear separation between the different elements in the track.

 The instrumentation of the track is basically drums,bass,guitars and vocals with some samples but the nature of this track and the sounds being created are far more than a standard 4/5 piece rock band.

 One of the most noticeable parts of the song is the guitars and here are some of the techniques which are being used to create the sound.



Kevin Shields had previously developed a style of playing guitar which was extremely distinctive. It involved a Fender Jaguar/Jazzmaster and constant use of the tremolo arm,which he kept in his hand at all times whilst playing.

He would use an effect called reverse reverb (Acually a preset on the Alesis Midi Verb ) play through a Vox AC30 amplifier and would often use alternate open tunings. A combination of these techniques would help him achieve the pitch shifting sound he was going for. Here are some direct quotes from Kevin Shields explaining how he achieved this.


“ The basic thing is using chord structures with open strings and different weird tunings combined with a guitar going through a Vox amplifier. That amp has the capacity to play almost anything through it and reproduces the sound of the weird chords very well.”

Shields continues to explain his technique with the tremolo arm.

“ I just kind of found my own way and my own feel, my own way of playing. It’s really hard to do unless you set the guitar up in a very specific way. I modified all the tremolo arms. I never did it with stock position, if you do it normally it doesn’t work at all. Normally when people use a tremolo arm you can hear them bending it, going up and down. For me, it was making it sound sort of unconscious, so that it didn’t sound like someone was doing it”.

This guitar sound is central to Kevin Sheilds ideas on how records should be made and to what he is trying to achieve on this track in particular but there are a lot of processes besides this guitar technique going on.

IN the next post i'll delve further into some of the sampling and processing techniques on Only Shallow.

Links to Ambient Guitars Vol 3

sampledelicsounds.com