“The hotshot guitar player at our gig said, ‘Your guitar sounds terrible. You should leave that thing on.’ So I turned on the Big Muff…” How a heckler helped J Mascis unlock his Dinosaur Jr. guitar tone

Through his work with Dinosaur Jr., J Mascis has curated one of the most instantly recognizable alternative guitar tones that many budding electric guitar players aspire to emulate.

However, while some guitarists put considerable effort into capturing the very essence of J Mascis’ sonic DNA, the truth is that J Mascis himself didn’t put much thought into his fuzz-loaded tone when he originally began Dinosaur Jr. in the mid-1980s.

In fact, he stumbled upon his hall-of-fame stoner rock tone purely by accident – and only after he was rather harshly heckled by an audience member during an early Dinosaur Jr. gig.

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In the new issue of Guitar World, the Jazzmaster-toting guitar hero looks back on the early days of Dinosaur Jr., and recalls how, around the time they were putting together their 1985 debut, Dinosaur, he only started learning the guitar as a means to write and perform.

“I was just learning guitar, Mascis remembers. “I picked it up to write songs and start a band, so whatever I was writing... that’s all I could play, pretty much.”

As such, his appreciation of guitar tone and the mechanics behind dialing in a suitable sound weren’t especially sophisticated.

“I didn’t know much about guitar tone,” he says. “I remember I had this Yamaha [G-100] solid-state amp because I saw that Bob Mould [Hüsker Dü] had one. I thought, ‘How bad could it be if Bob Mould has one?’

“Then the hotshot guitar player at our gig said, ‘Your guitar sounds terrible.’ I had the deluxe [Electro-Harmonix] Big Muff, and he’s like, ‘You should leave that thing on,’ because I had [the amp] clean. So I turned on the Big Muff and was like, ‘Yeah... okay.’”

The rest, they say, is history, and Mascis’ love affair with the Big Muff (the ‘Ram’s Head’ version, specifically) would go on to define the Dinosaur Jr. sound, feature heavily in the Fuzz: The Sound That Revolutionized The World documentary, and eventually lead to a signature Electro-Harmonic Muff that received rave reviews.

At the time, though, it wasn’t just tone that Mascis approached with an unorthodox mindset – it was also his playing in general.

J Mascis on His Signature EHX Ram's Head Big Muff - YouTube

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“We were kind of just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck,” he adds of Dinosaur Jr.’s early records. “We didn’t have a ‘sound’ yet; every song seemed different. There was a country song, a Joy Division song. Plus, I hadn’t been playing guitar for that long.

“A lot of the chords had two fingers because I couldn’t do barre chords; they hurt my hands. I’d just make up chords with the least amount of fingers possible.”

Head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the newest issue of Guitar World, which features interviews with J Mascis, Kiki Wong, Joe Perry, Jim Babjak and more.