Prolific Country Guitarist Reveals Counterintuitive Trick Neil Young Used to “Grab Attention,” Much Like Velvet Underground

Few music scenes capture the bright, pitch-perfect twang of a guitar quite like Nashville, so it would make sense that one of the city’s most prolific players would notice a characteristic of Neil Young’s music that was hiding in plain sight. In a conversation with Otis Gibbs, Kenny Vaughan (of Marty Stuart’s Fabulous Superlatives fame) described why he loved Young’s music so much—not in spite of his music’s imperfections, but because of them.

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While discussing autotune, a tool used to digitally manipulate a singer’s voice to hit a certain note, Vaughan brought up the Canadian singer-songwriter as an example of someone who would never use what Vaughan and his friend called the “no singer left behind box.” On the contrary, Vaughan said, “If you listen to [Neil Young’s] guitar solos, he plays with notes that are deliberately out of tune.”

“That’s a thing, you know?” Vaughan continued. “It creates attention.” The guitarist argued that if one were to go back through Young’s discography and correct all of the off-pitch notes, the music wouldn’t feel the same. It wouldn’t have the same emotional impact, and frankly, Vaughan said, “It would suck.”

Neil Young and The Velvet Underground Implemented the Same Techniques

The musical world, generally speaking, prefers notes that fit within a certain scale. Funky, unusual scales are one thing. A note that seems to hover in a too-sharp or too-flat space outside of any mode, be it aeolian or locrian, sounds sour to most of our ears. Anyone particularly sensitive to these out-of-tune notes has likely noticed that Neil Young utilizes plenty of them in his music. But the magic of Young’s off-key technique is that he maintains control over the entire melody and key. He builds and releases tension in artistic ways, making those moments of dissonance more cathartic than distracting.

Kenny Vaughan argues that Young shares this counterintuitive characteristic with The Velvet Underground. “[Young] plays with tuning the way The Velvet Underground did on the first album,” he explained. “Sterling Morrison and John Kale were deliberately detuning their guitars to get a more irritating sound.” That first album was the band’s eponymous debut with Nico, which featured tracks like “Venus in Furs”, “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, and “Sunday Morning”.

Young, meanwhile, has always had a Dylan-esque, rubato nature to his vocal delivery, which mirrors his abrasive approach to the guitar. Though divisive in more critical circles, Young (and The Velvet Underground) serve as a helpful reminder to even the cleanest of chicken pickers like Vaughan: sometimes, adding a bit of grime is a good thing. It keeps the listener’s ear from becoming too lazy and helps to get your point across in sound alone.

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