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Hi every1. Does anyone happen to know what settings Steve used for his IVP pre-amp in Big Black (or Rapeman) ? Surprisingly I haven't been able to find a decent live photo from that era that shows a good view of the IVP.

Thanks,
Jimmy.

Steve himself chimed in on a thread about weirdo outboard guitar preamps and said the secret of the sound is unlocked in the tube section and the eq. I think quite a few of us have also reported being underwhelmed by the device and never really quite nailed it. I'm not sure if he used a harmonic percolator in those days but those have always sounded more like most important component of the SA-associated tone to me than the IVP.

Beyond that just plug "IVP" into the search function and start digging.

Beyond using the tube channel on the IVP, a full range speaker cabinet and metal pick with single coil pickups will get you close I’m not aware of specific settings. I think the IVP was run direct to tape with no speaker cabinet on some of those big black recordings. I don’t think the harmonic percolator was used much if at all in the big black period it certainly wasn’t used much in Shellac. RIP FM Steve

Yeah, definitely not an expert on the SA guitar tone evolution/equipment and there are many here who are. My assumption that it was "something else" (Harm Perc) as the secret weapon for generating that signature sound was based entirely on my own experience w/ the IVP itself. I've messed around w/ mine for a long time not chasing HIS sound but thinking "well if it can do THAT what else can it do that might also sound interesting" and coming up short on both.

I’ve never played an IVP or tried for the Big Black sound but I think part of that whole thing was to cut the midrange in the preamp’s eq, then use both (SD Quarter Pounder) pickups wired in series with a notched metal pick. I think he was also using Rats and MXR delays for slapback echos and stuff around then too.

It’s not as easy to UTFSF anymore, so somebody might confirm. For all the Questions For Steve over the years, there were little details about his guitar sounds that stayed fairly obscure, even through the Shellac years. I remember being baffled that so many of the post-1000 Hurts guitar sounds seemed so different with each record before it came out that he had been experimenting with different amps in the studio the whole time. I’d even said something to that effect on here at the time and he’d commented that he put new EGC pickups in his guitar, but in retrospect that might have been when he started using other stuff besides his famous live rig.

Interesting. I think the full range cab probably is important as Steve used his "Traynor CS-115H" during the T&G Big Black 2006 "reunion" not his normal shellac cab (which was right there too).

I have a IVP clone pedal built by dirtysockseffects and thought it'd be fun to try and recreate Steve's tone. Here are Steve's own words on what he thought of some of those pedal clones.

steve wrote: Mon Dec 18, 2023 3:38 pm The thing that makes the IVP unique is the "tube" distortion circuit, which uses a saturated transformer as the clipping element. The other parts of the circuit, the bass/treble controls and the 5-band EQ, are conventional. The EQ comes before the distortion, so it has a profound effect on the nature of the saturation. The clean channel should be pretty simple to copy but I've found little use for the clean channel. I mean no use. Never liked it on anything.

The "tube" channel is unlike any other distortion, and the pedals I've tried that purported to emulate it have not really gotten that close. I'm sure the particular part choice for the "clipping" transformer has a lot to do with the sound, given that it's being used in a failure mode and everything fails differently, but it would be cool if somebody revived the concept, did the hard work of listening to a bunch of transformers being roasted and made a pedal with that sound in it. It's an ugly sound but hey I made a living.

That being said, this guy does a comparison of the orginal IVP rack unit vs a pedal clone and it sounds pretty similiar to me. So im confused.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWfZrQdfb4k

I will try and seek out a gtr with some Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder's i guess

Garth wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2025 10:17 am I'm not sure if he used a harmonic percolator in those days but those have always sounded more like most important component of the SA-associated tone to me than the IVP.

The HP-1 didn't show up until RM. The whole "HP-1" cult is very funny to me because I don't think he ever used it for more than like, 10-20 seconds of any given song.

I did an absurd amount of research/tone questing when I did my goofy Xmas Big Black covers EP for WPRB a few years ago. For Steve's guitar, it was pretty much the guitar w/ Quarter Pound pickups with the weird phase switching and the IVP into a power amp and full-frequency cab. As others noted, he occasionally used a Rat and for a while had some goofy-ass rack mount delay (MXR Delay System II) that was around in the BB/RM days. If the "notched pick" was more of a tactile thing vs. a sound thing, well, that's hard to say. I think Steve's tone over the years was always greater than the sum of its parts, and the gear aspects of it meant less as time went on. I saw Shellac do an in-store at Reckless in 2019 and they didn't bring the Shellac amps. Steve just used a blonde Bassman with a 4x12" and guess what, it sounded exactly like Steve.

Ultimately, your ear is your best guide. I remember one of the old Intersound manuals suggesting that you just start with everything at noon and then adjust gradually until you find your sweet spots. I really think "subtlety" is the name of the game with the IVP and I think it sounds like shit when most people use it because they just immediately go to 11 with it, and all of the pedal copies are approximations of the "IVP at 11" sound, which is why they also sound like shit.

The settings are available--they're just locked up in his Shellac head.

Maybe someday someone will open like it, like one of the pyramids, and divine the secrets.

I think Steve's tone over the years was always greater than the sum of its parts, and the gear aspects of it meant less as time went on. I saw Shellac do an in-store at Reckless in 2019 and they didn't bring the Shellac amps. Steve just used a blonde Bassman with a 4x12" and guess what, it sounded exactly like Steve.

Yes.

I heard him play acoustic on several occasions, and it sounded exactly as you would expect. Always funny.

The pick mattered--just using a metal one can get you some of the "skeeeeeeng" sound, and the notch does this funny doubling effect.

The out-of-phase neck/bridge thing in BBlack, the full-range cab thing...all part of it. Solid-state element in the amp part also, throughout.

But I know he would use literally whatever amp was around on the Shellac records, much of the time, and it didn't sound markedly different. The TB500 was more or less a constant as far as i know.

The Percolator was critical in that it could play itself, and when whatever needed to happen was beyond his ability to play it, he'd step on the Perc.

It's like the way Hendrix or Pete Cosey used the wah pedal. I don't know if you've ever used a wah pedal, but they're essentially useless for non-polite playing unless you do what they did and really whack out the signal in another way, either going into the pedal (for sure Pete Cosey, heavy fuzz) or on the amp side (probably more Hendrix), in which case the wah can get really vicious.

Or when Richard Lloyd would wind down his low E string until he could pull it behind the neck like the string on an archery bow--one of those moves to get beyond the regular guitar stuff.

From a playing standpoint, his willingness to utterly abuse his equipment was higher than most people, and he had big hands. He played a lot of surprisingly weird, spread-out chordal stuff in Shellac in particular.

I think he considered himself to be somewhat lazy as a guitarist, shortest distance between two points kind of thing. But his idea of obvious was not a normal person's idea of obvious. He would make connections, between fairly mundane mechanical parts (re equipment), between musical/sonic notions, that seemed normal to him but were definitely super idiosyncratic.

eephus wrote: Sat Apr 26, 2025 11:30 am He played a lot of surprisingly weird, spread-out chordal stuff in Shellac in particular.

That was something I never caught until I saw them live. In particular, that bit in "A Minute" before the first "verse" kicks in and he was droning with the fretted A on the E string, the open A, and then the fretted A on the D string, but then using his index finger to hit the C on the open A.

On the record you might not think much of it, but to see it live really brought the whole thing together. The use of drone/open strings in Shellac always seemed like an extension of the stuff Robert Poss was doing in Band of Susans, but once again, filtered through Steve's idiosyncratic way of playing.

four_oclocker_2.2 wrote: Sat Apr 26, 2025 11:52 am On the record you might not think much of it, but to see it live really brought the whole thing together. The use of drone/open strings in Shellac always seemed like an extension of the stuff Robert Poss was doing in Band of Susans, but once again, filtered through Steve's idiosyncratic way of playing.

yeah, he rated Band of Susans highly and no doubt he got ideas from Robert