![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/gillan4.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/mcbride1.jpg)
7 And 7 Is live on German TV
Deep Purple performing 7 And 7 Is live* on a German TV show Das Erste am Morgen.
* Except we don’t think Steve was actually in the same studio or, in fact, on the same continent as the rest of the band. Which raises some interesting technical questions…
Thanks to Boleslaw’s Deep Purple Family Fan Channel for posting the video and Orhun Yakın for the heads up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
The old promotional video ‘trick’ eh? Cheers.
November 27th, 2021 at 21:16-nice-
LLRnR
kraatzy
November 27th, 2021 at 21:22I think it ist – at least from 4 of the 5 – played live. The Keyboards are much more prominent and the sound is much more powerful… The vocals are different.
November 28th, 2021 at 09:28A great version.
Strange that Roger isn’t playing his Vigier…
November 28th, 2021 at 10:02@4: In the RG Q&A after the pre-listen show on YouTube the other day, he said that all his main equipment is with the crew so he had to record on an old bass he had at home. I think it was a Music Man. I guess he had to just use whatever they had where they recorded this thing.
November 28th, 2021 at 18:18It is a Music Man Stingray, Svante. He’s had it for twenty years at least. The booklet of Gov’t Mule’s ‘The Deep End Vol. 1’ CD features a pic of him with it, recording ‘Pictures of Home’ with them in the studio. As an active circuit, 9-volt battery driven bass, it is not dissimilar to his Vigiers, generally a bass you use if you want to be heard without too much tweaking.
Basically, the Stingray was Leo Fender’s new take on the classic (passive) Fender Precision Bass when he sold his stake in that company and set up Music Man in the mid-seventies. At the time, the active circuit plus the idiosyncratic egg shape pick guard as well as the 3+1 tuner set-up were something new. The Stingray quickly became a classic of its own with many name players using it for quite a while (eg John Deacon of Queen, Benjamin Orr of The Cars, Tom Hamilton of Aerosmith, Flea of RHCP, Boz Burrell of Bad Company and Dougie Thomson of Supertramp).
November 30th, 2021 at 01:31Waow, fantastic performance, full of energy… Hard to believe that Gillan i’s supposed to turn 77 next summer!
November 30th, 2021 at 07:29Uwe, thanks for the bass guitar info & your collection of guitars is stellar indeed. Regarding Glover’s bass playing here, can anyone hear it? I certainly cannot. Cheers.
December 1st, 2021 at 05:20Just connected the puter to a better system, can hear the bass guitar much better now. Cheers.
December 1st, 2021 at 06:22As bass guitarists in hard rock bands go, you could always hear Roger well, Martin Birch (a bass-friendly producer and engineer) made sure of that. (Of course, my ears have 46 years of training picking him out of the mix!) And Little Ian, Jon and Ritchie all left space for him, so audibility wasn’t an issue, not even on Made in Japan where everything was “mine goes to eleven”. In fact, on those Japanese live recordings his bass sound is a beast.
Roger was for a long time on a quest for the right bass sound with Deep Purple, he played a Fender P-Bass on In Rock, changed to a short scale Fender Mustang for Fireball, but that wasn’t right either for him, and really found his bass voice only with the Rickenbacker 4001 which he used from Machine Head onward (the Fender P-Bass pictured on the Machine Head sleeve wasn’t used during the recording), IMHO he never sounded better before or after.
The Vigiers he plays today are nice, but a bit hifi’sh to my ears, the Rics had more grit. When he joined Rainbow in the late 70ies, he never went back to his old trademark Ric sound which had been an integral part of DP’s sound from 1971-73. I’ve read in interviews that he wanted a cleaner sound for Rainbow and he basically stuck with that sound (though he changed bass brands frequently: Gibson Thunderbird, Ovation Magnum, Hondo Longhorn and Peavey) for the Purple reunion, continuing to play Peavey and finally Steinberg basses (the headless “paddle” he used with Mk V) before he found what he wanted with the Vigiers.
The only 70ies Purple album where the bass isn’t quite where it should be in the overall sound is Burn. It seems like Martin Birch had issues getting Glenn’s sound on tape (it sounds too dark and deep in the mix, which is ironic given that Glenn generally had a much more aggressive and attention-grabbing sound than Roger) even though Glenn played – unusual for him, he’s essentially a Fender player – with DP initially a Ric too, but in his hands it sounded different to Roger and again not quite right. On Stormbringer the bass comes out a lot better, but by then Glenn had reverted to playing a Fender P-Bass, an instrument he obviously felt more at home with and which Martin Birch also recorded better.
December 2nd, 2021 at 01:49@ 10 – yes there is something about those Rickenbackers & older Fenders also. Call me old school, but for my lay mans ears, the sound coming off a record, cd or a filmed live recording is all I hear of them. Chris Squire’s sound, although slightly modified I think, is the one I had the pleasure of hearing at a Yes concert back in 2003, a wonderful experience indeed. Glover’s sound back in the early 70’s was great, as were a few other musicians that used them. Steinberg, now there’s a conundrum, Geddy Lee moving from a Rickenbacker to one of those in the early 80’s, what a shock that was. I think it was a Steinberg & I never liked the sound of those bass guitars. At least Ged went back to a Fender later on, from my memory. Cheers.
December 2nd, 2021 at 20:55Official charts so far…
#5 Germany
December 3rd, 2021 at 19:13#14 Sweden
#21 Norway
#24 Italia
#25 Netherlands
#28 United Kingdom
— #1 Rock & Metal Albums
— #12 Scotland
— #13 UK Sales
— #18 UK Vinyl