The Imploding Voice

"If a guitar part sounded too bright, we would run the signal off the tape, reprocess it through effects and run it back to tape. In a lot of cases, we would use the original signal plus the reprocessed signal because it would produce a larger sound. We did that on 'The Imploding Voice' where we used about 75 percent of the new signal and 25% of the original."

Guitar World - 4/2000

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"The Imploding Voice" is another song on MACHINA that's played in "C tuning." On the recording, however, the key sounds about a quarter-step sharp. Corgan explains: "We recorded the drum track and then decided it was a bit too fast. So we slowed down the tape speed and recorded the rest of the parts. When the engineer put the tape on again several days later, he forgot to slow it down. We said, 'Hey, that sounds great - lets keep it like that!"

FIGURE 5 depicts the first two bars of the tune's intro. This catchy phrase consists of an A5 power chord strummed repeatedly in a simple "duh-dut" eighth-note rhythm. What makes this part sound interesting is the way the two-note rhythmic motif is shift-ed to a different part of the measure each time it's repeated; instead of begining squarely on beat 1, then on beat 3, then on beat 1 again, it starts a half a beat earlier than expected each time (a cool compositional device is known as rhythmic displacement). This is the same phrasing scheme we looked at earlier in the outro to "The Everlasting Gaze"

FIGURE 6 illustrates the chord grips Corgan strums (using this same two-bar rhythmic pattern) during the song's intro and verse sections. To play along with the recording, remember to tune all six strings down two whole steps as indicated, then tune each string up approximately one quarter step.

Guitar World - 4/2000