Hi gain amplification. Tube saturation. It’s magical.
Not really amazing at all. If you play electric guitar you’d know that. Pretty routine actually.
Check out Frank Zappa, Al Demiola, Jeff Beck, Steve Vie among many other greats.
BTW, Carlos Santana couldn’t hold any of their picks. Carlos is just Ok at best compared.
One of those effects pedals...and he put the pedal to the metal.
Held the note, kicked on a compressor, and maybe a little slow digital delay.
Had an MXR compressor many years ago that would give you screaming sustain if you let it feedback... coupled it with an EC100 analog (tape) echo, and it was... awesome.
Don’t know if that’s what Carlos is using, but I’d bet something similar.
He sold his soul to the Devil.
feedback
Just the right amount of audio feedback from the amplifier back to the guitar. If you do it right, it doesn’t squeal or shriek, it just keeps your note going, as long as you want.
Paul Reed Smith guitars.
Santana uses them.
Probably lots of compression too.
I use a simple Maxon compression in front of all my pedals and it makes my Strat sustain way longer than it can by itself.
Lots of compression from either a fuzz box or onboard amplifier distortion. Pretty easy to get his basic tone but what’s hard to copy are his pitch perfect bends and dead on sense of phrasing and timing. He’s one of the few guys who doesn’t hide behind vibrato when he bends but instead just nails the note and stays there. There are a lot of players who are more technical than Carlos Santana but few who are as musical, especially in his early years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVI7ZDDQXKA
I saw Santana on the Moonflower tour back in seventy-something. I’ll never forget it. He held the that note for so long it hurt.
He held that note longer tan he did iron the album, so it wasn’t a studio trick. Probably a combination of a high-gain tube amp and a compressor cranked all the way up just a guess.
“I’ll be Waiting” was the highlight of the show, for me. After that “She’s not there”.
Adding to the above ^ the pickups in the guitar and the type wood dont hurt either. He plays PRS guitars which are made of top grade materials and typically uses the neck pickup for that tone and almost always plays in the pentatonic scale. He uses a Mesa Boogie amp cranked with a boost pedal. For that type tone a tubescreamer pedal with a little delay will do the job. It’s not hard to get that tone really.
Boogie amp + fat sounding pickups + volume + standing in the right spot near the amp to control the feedback. Probably effects also ... but Carlos could make the basic sound happen with just those ingredients.
The disinformation is flowing already in some cases.
But the posters citing (vacuum) tube saturation are correct. Combined with proper technique e.g. finger vibrato, long sustains with a ‘hot’ amp are hardly a chore.
Santana, like many iconic guitarists, is a bit of a purist therefore his emphasis is on the amplifier rather than a load of effects. As someone once pointed out, if you want tube saturation and an all-analog sound, why are you running your signal through a solid-state germanium transistor-based pedal?
Mesa/Boogie is a well-known name...the first Boogies were hot-rodded Fender Princetons and one of the early adopters was...Carlos Santana, who also used subsequent original-design Boogie models.
There there is the Dumble Overdrive, a Holy Grail-type of amplifier made by hand by its eponymous inventor and only when he feels like it. No two alike etc. Tens of thousands of dollars.
I saw Santana on the Moonflower tour back in seventy-something. I’ll never forget it. He held the that note for so long it hurt.
He held that note longer tan he did iron the album, so it wasn’t a studio trick. Probably a combination of a high-gain tube amp and a compressor cranked all the way up just a guess.
“I’ll be Waiting” was the highlight of the show, for me. After that “She’s not there”.
4 second sustain? Just turn up the amp. Once your strings start to vibrate sympathetically in sync with the amp, you can hold the sustain forever. It’s a controlled feedback.
I saw Carlos do it in San Diego back in 1969. It was feedback controlled by his guitar gain knob.
Technique 1:
Turn it up loud enough so the energy from the speakers keeps the string exited. This sustain will last forever (as long as the amp is on).
You have to have pickups that won’t squeal by themselves from the feedback.
Compression helps control it, but you still need the above feedback effect to sustain the note forever.
You can move about and find harmonics of the fundamental frequency. Pretty cool (see Steve Vai).
Technique 2:
Simple compression. This boosts the volume of the signal as the string loses energy. Won’t last forever but you can get much longer notes. It helps to have a stiff guitar so the string loses energy at a slower rate.
Technique 3:
Drive a synth with the guitar. This is more common these days as synthesizer technologies blend with traditional effects. In this case the synth is actually making the sound, triggered by the string. A synth note can have infinite decay.
Technique 4:
Use something else to keep the string exited (put energy into the string), like an e-bow, or even an old fashioned violin bow.
I think that exhausts it...
Harmonic feedback. It’s a beautiful thing. Unfortunately Carlos is one who can not just play. He will insert his lefty opinions at some point in the show, guaranteed.
Some delay and some compression, I’d imagine..
I don’t know the tune, but “active electronics” comes to mind. If that even existed back then.