Vinnie Bell (born Vincent Gambella, 1935, New York, United States) is a leading American session guitarist and pioneer of electronic effects in pop music. He played in nightclubs in New York City in the late 1950s. By 1962, Bell decided to devote his energies to working as a studio musician both in New York and Los Angeles, California, developing a “watery” guitar sound popular in instrumental recordings in the 1960s. Vinnie played on Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, for one. He also invented a number of electric guitar models, including the first electric 12-string guitar, and the electric sitar, using it on such hits as “Green Tambourine” by The Lemon Pipers, and the main theme from the 1970 film, Airport. (More from Wikipedia)
Wikipedia describes what happened next: “On June 15, 1965, immediately after the recording session of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, [Tom] Wilson took the original acoustically instrumented track of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1964 version [of “The Sounds of Silence”], and overdubbed the recording with electric guitar (played by Al Gorgoni and Vinnie Bell), electric bass (Joe Mack), and drums (Buddy Saltzman), and released it as a single without consulting [Paul] Simon or [Art] Garfunkel. The lack of consultation with Simon and Garfunkel on Wilson’s re-mix was because, although still contracted to Columbia Records at the time, the musical duo at that time was no longer a ‘working entity’. Roy Halee was the recording engineer, who in spirit with the success of the Byrds and their success formula in folk rock, introduced an echo chamber effect into the song. Al Gorgoni later would reflect that this echo effect worked well on the finished recording, but would dislike the electric guitar work they technically superimposed on the original acoustic piece.”
(June 2013/2)
