Dave Greenfield
Overview
The Stranglers
The Stranglers are an English punk/rock music group.Scoring some 23 UK top 40 singles and 17 UK top 40 albums to date in a career spanning five decades, the Stranglers are the longest-surviving and most "continuously successful" band to have originated in the UK punk scene of the mid to late 1970s...
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He is noted for his trademark style of playing rapid arpeggio
Arpeggio
An arpeggio is a musical technique where notes in a chord are played or sung in sequence, one after the other, rather than ringing out simultaneously...
s. His distinctive sound on the early Stranglers recordings involved the use of Hohner
Hohner
Hohner Musikinstrumente GmbH & Co. KG is a company specialising in the manufacture of musical instruments. Founded in 1857 by Matthias Hohner , Hohner is identified especially with harmonicas and accordions. The Hohner company has invented and produced many different styles, and most of the...
Cembalet electric piano, Hammond
Hammond organ
The Hammond organ is an electric organ invented by Laurens Hammond in 1934 and manufactured by the Hammond Organ Company. While the Hammond organ was originally sold to churches as a lower-cost alternative to the wind-driven pipe organ, in the 1960s and 1970s it became a standard keyboard...
L-100 electric organ, a Minimoog
Minimoog
The Minimoog is a monophonic analog synthesizer, invented by Bill Hemsath and Robert Moog. It was released in 1970 by R.A. Moog Inc. , and production was stopped in 1981. It was re-designed by Robert Moog in 2002 and released as Minimoog Voyager.The Minimoog was designed in response to the use of...
synthesizer, and later an Oberheim
Oberheim
Oberheim Electronics is an American company, founded in 1969 by Tom Oberheim , which manufactured audio synthesizers and a variety of other electronic musical instruments.-Oberheim Electronics:...
FVS-4 polyphonic synthesizer.
He also frequently contributes harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
backing vocals to the band's songs, and sang the lead vocals
Human voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal folds for talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, etc. Its frequency ranges from about 60 to 7000 Hz. The human voice is specifically that part of human sound production in which the vocal folds are the primary...
on a few of their tracks, including:
- "Dead Ringer" and "Peasant in the Big Shitty" from their album No More Heroes
- "Do You Wanna?" from Black and WhiteBlack and White (The Stranglers album)Black and White is The Stranglers third studio album and was recorded within 18 months of their debut Rattus Norvegicus. Produced by Martin Rushent and engineered by Alan Winstanley, the album is divided into the Black side and White side, each nominally characterised by the style and mood of the...
- "Genetix" on the album The RavenThe Raven (The Stranglers album)The Raven is an album by The Stranglers, released in 1979. The album was originally released with a limited edition 3-D cover. Another limited edition was inadvertently created when the band was forced to remove an image of Joh Bjelke-Petersen from the inner sleeve artwork...
- "Four Horsemen" on the album The Gospel According to the MeninblackThe Gospel According to the MeninblackThe Gospel According to The Meninblack is an esoteric concept album made by The Stranglers and released in 1981. The album deals with conspiratorial ideas surrounding alien visitations to Earth, the sinister governmental Men in Black, and the involvement of these elements in well-known biblical...
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On the albums The Raven, Gospel According to the Meninblack and Aural Sculpture
Aural Sculpture
Aural Sculpture is an album recorded by The Stranglers. It was also the name given to a one-sided 7-inch single given free with a limited number of copies of their Feline album in 1983...
, Greenfield also used a Korg
Korg
is a Japanese multinational corporation that manufactures electronic musical instruments, audio processors and guitar pedals, recording equipment, and electronic tuners...
VC-10 vocoder
Vocoder
A vocoder is an analysis/synthesis system, mostly used for speech. In the encoder, the input is passed through a multiband filter, each band is passed through an envelope follower, and the control signals from the envelope followers are communicated to the decoder...
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