Green Day Effect in 21 Guns?

[artfulairbus]

Does anyone know the effect that was used in the beginning of 21 Guns right before the acoustics?

[Hell Cat Troll]

There isn't an effect they are just turning the volume on the guitar up and down while moving their fingers to the right spots. No strumming 

[fireballmx]

I never tab stuff out for people...but its pretty simple:

x 5 x x 6 x ....

x 1 x x 3 x

x 8 x x 10 x

x 3 x x 5 x

x means don't play/mute the string

Just play around with it on the amp

[Jimmy Strummer]

I can tell you it's not so easily done on guitar, so the explanation that Hell Cat Troll gave is most likely not that. In reality, it's one of two things:

1. it's a simple audio editing trick where Billie played the notes on the guitar and then Chris Dugan, Butch Vig, or Chris Lord-Alge went to the sound file, made a duplicate of each note, reversed each of those duplicates, and then placed them right next to each corresponding original note so it has that fade-in-fade-out effect to it.

2. Billie used a volume pedal, played each note at zero, brought up the pedal to increase the volume, and then brought it back down just as quickly to, again, give it that fade-in-fade-out sound.

[Travis.]

It's not that hard to do, here's a cover that shows it done

 

[Joe.]

3 hours ago, Jimmy Strummer said:

I can tell you it's not so easily done on guitar, so the explanation that Hell Cat Troll gave is most likely not that. In reality, it's one of two things:

1. it's a simple audio editing trick where Billie played the notes on the guitar and then Chris Dugan, Butch Vig, or Chris Lord-Alge went to the sound file, made a duplicate of each note, reversed each of those duplicates, and then placed them right next to each corresponding original note so it has that fade-in-fade-out effect to it.

2. Billie used a volume pedal, played each note at zero, brought up the pedal to increase the volume, and then brought it back down just as quickly to, again, give it that fade-in-fade-out sound.

You can do that with a volume knob

[Spike]

1 hour ago, JoeFrusciante said:

You can do that with a volume knob

You can, but it's highly unlikely they did in the studio. It's definitely reversed on the record, you can tell by how quickly the notes cut out once they're full volume.

[W_FInkThePlatypusHunter]

16 hours ago, Spike said:

You can, but it's highly unlikely they did in the studio. It's definitely reversed on the record, you can tell by how quickly the notes cut out once they're full volume.

It wouldn't be the first use of reversing audio on that record, I'd believe it.

[Spike]

32 minutes ago, W_FInkThePlatypusHunter said:

It wouldn't be the first use of reversing audio on that record, I'd believe it.

They wouldn't even be the millionth, even I did it before them  

[Jimmy Strummer]

20 hours ago, Spike said:

You can, but it's highly unlikely they did in the studio. It's definitely reversed on the record, you can tell by how quickly the notes cut out once they're full volume.

Exactly. I didn't say you couldn't achieve that effect by turning the volume knob up and down, but I did say that it's more difficult and doesn't achieve the effect as well as using a volume pedal or editing the audio. That guy in the guitar cover achieved it with the volume knob probably because he worked extremely hard to get the technique down just right. Who knows, maybe Billie did try that method in the studio but he just wasn't getting the sound out of it that he wanted, so they either used a pedal or fixed it in editing.