My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields on the Jazzmaster and His Iconic Albums

For a person so closely associated with the Fender Jazzmaster, My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields waited a little bit to get the guitar he is most known for.

MBV was already five years old by the time he picked up his first Jazzmaster, having played knockoff versions of popular guitar brands up to that point.

But one fateful day, a friend named Bill Carey let him borrow a real-life 1964 Fender Jazzmaster that was so smooth – with its sleek contours, interesting tremolo arm and fantastical switches – he was smitten ... even if it was a challenge at first.

“It happened that the actual strings on this guitar were quite heavy. And I was like, ‘Man, this is hard,'" he noted. "I said, ‘Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll just tune the two strings together, and I'll bend it like that.’"

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Thankfully, Shields never stopped bending those strings.

The My Bloody Valentine singer/guitarist went on to create a sound all his own, a monilith of noise framed with heavy distortion, textures for days and warped pitch bending.

This became known as "glide guitar."

The washed technique was applied by tuning two strings to just slight of the same pitch before adding a little vibrato.

Sheilds discovered this technique organically over the course of a few hours.

"Literally the first song I ever did using it was the song from the You Made Me Realise EP called 'Thorn,'" he recalled. "That was the first hour I discovered it. I did a song called 'Slow,' which was the first time I did that melted kind of effect. I put it through a reverse reverb, and then thought that sounds good. And I then thought, turn the tone down. I thought, 'Wow, it totally sounds totally like some weird tape, sort of copy of a copy of a copy.'

"And then I was playing fast and started bending the tremolo arm, and it started going. This all happened in one afternoon."

Were it not for that fateful '64 Jazzmaster and its groundbreaking floating tremolo, in addition to his heavy use of effects pedals (he tours with 63 of them), the world might not have heard MBV's iconic albums, such as the smash 1988 offering Isn't Anything and its follow-up, Loveless.

Both of those not only put My Bloody Valentine on the worldwide map, but they also inspired countless bands to come thereafter, such as Radiohead, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, Mogwai, Deerhunter and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to name a few.

"I just gravitated nearly solely to the Jazzmaster in the '90s," Shields said. "I was already a massive fan of the shape. I didn't know what this was all about until I discovered it, you know what I mean? (The tremolo)meant I couldn't play guitar without this."

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