I'm a sucker for cheap tricks in music. Little sound tricks that in retrospect seem obvious but that I wouldn't necessarily be able to come up with myself. I say I'm a sucker for them because it's often those little sonic nuances I find myself drawn to when I particularily like the sound of a song.
I got to thinking about this because of the Rival Schools song Everything Has Its Point (Spotify) from their fantastic 2001 album United By Fate. Make more, won't you, Walter? I digress. The sound I'm talking about is in the chorus: that great sounding mix of an overdriven or distorted guitar in combination with a clean acoustic. Wow. You can almost feel the strings rattle and the neck bend on that furious acoustic as it is reinforced by the knife sharp overdriven electric, and the acoustic adds a lot of rhythm and string sounds to what would probably be a pretty muddy electric sound otherwise.
Incubus uses this same trick on their Wish You Were Here (Spotify) from Morning View. On that track the effect is even more apparent from the slightly more wood resonating sound of the gorgeous Paul Reed Smith McCarthy archtop that guitarist Mike Einziger was playing at the time, a guitar that retains a lot of its acoustic sound even when heavily overdriven.
Neat stuff, both from Rival Schools and Incubus, just a little addition that goes a long way on both songs. It's weird how an acoustic guitar can add even more aggressiveness to an electric guitar, but that's what it does here. The percussive stroke and extra depth really opens up the sound of the electric.
