Older, Richer, Higher and Smarter are the four words that tell you all you need to know about In Utero Nirvanas final studio Album.
In early 1993 Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic would arrive at Pachyderm studios deep in the woods of Minesota about two to three days later Dave Grohl would fly in. With the gang there and a new producer in Steve Albini in Utero was ready to be kicked off.
Steve Albini is in all words a legend of punk rock. He prior to Nirvana produced The Pixies and Jesus Lizard among many others to great critical success. His style was a perfect blind of the previous Nirvana producers, Albini featured the harsh noisy alternative rock sound mixed with the carefully cleaned sound of Butch Vig. Albini also featured an ability to do something that was largely overlooked by creating odd sounds just from the guitar and pedals.
GEAR USED FOR In Utero
Kurt
1965 Fender Jaguar modified to have a Dimarzio humbucker and a three-way style selector switch and coil split controls on the guitar.
A 1960-69 Jaguar with Seymour Duncan pickups installed and DiMarzio’s.
Potentially an Ibanez Les Paul with Dimarzio humbuckers
A Stella 12 string guitar that was strung up with only 5 nylon strings (Writers note that the same guitar featured on Something in the way and Polly from Nevermind.)
A Hi flier with a set of humbuckers (possibly the stock ones)
A fender twin reverb
A Modded Fender Frankenstein amp with several different tubes’ speakers and wiring configurations.
A Boss Ds-2 super distortion pedal
An Electro Harmonix Chorus Pedal
A Sans amp Classic
A mysterious Pedal X
A Echo Flanger Pedal.
Krist
A Marshall Combo Head and Cabinet
A Gibson Rd Bass
(Note he didn’t use any pedals most of his distortion comes from his preamp being cranked loud with high gain and him simply playing harder and with the volume pot on his guitar being turned up as well.)
Dave
His Drumkit often varied but the studio recording featured a Tama large kit with that iconic large Tom and Kick. Plus, a sonar hi hat stand that was indeed high
The lead off track of this album in many ways is a change of pace.” Serve the Servants” sounded different even from “Blew” and “Smells like teen spirit”. Nirvana was trying hard to distance themselves from the clean production or “Nevermind” while finding ways to maintain it. So more came out of the production phase. The trio would play in a rehearsal room and track songs live. “Serve the Servants” is wonderfully dissonant, and it clashes itself it embraces its loud noisiness while staying relatively easy on the ears the studio magic of Steve Albini.
“Scentless Apprentice” has iconic moments throughout; this is one of the songs you hear once and just know the drumbeat to start off a powerful 4/4 fast paced loop encroaches the song the cymbals ring out well. Kurt employs a very nice use of chromatic walk downs throughout the song I.E the opening bar to the guitar part features a F to F# to G ending on a 19th fret B (Fourth octave) with a clash of the open B (B3 in concordance to a piano) string. This creates a lot of dissonance with the vocal part Kurt sings at a F# as the main chorus features a G# fretted hammer on sound from the guitar barely reaching a harmony as the song moves in full steps and barely remains in the key of G and F.
This is the end to part one a lot of my posts have been extremely long and not as in depth as I would hope so my compromise shorter more in detail in depth posts. This Allows for the first part to show what gear the artist used (pedals, amps, and guitars.) and maybe how they used them (amp settings pedal chain order and settings) . Part two will have the rest of songs from In Utero as well as some of the changes the live versions of these songs saw.
