I’m 99% sure this one is done but at a minimum I’m going to need to give it a few days and see how it sounds just to give my fingers a break. The chorus on this one has a lot of 22nd fret high D’s bent up to E’s hitting them hard to make them really scream, and then holding them, and for all the blues I’ve played in my day, that’s really taken a toll on my fingertips!

I expected the solo section on this one to be hard, but I also thought the opening verse (which I played on my Strat) might be the hardest part of this one, as I really wanted to get the touch and feel on the guitar exactly dialed in. And, to my surprise, I nailed that in just a couple takes. The solo actually wans’t all that bad either. What killed me was the pre-chorus melody, where I ended up spending three separate sessions working on this trying to get the feel and the bends just right, and scrapped the first two to start fresh on the third. I think it’s there, but as I’m recording I’m also thinking about what I want to spend a lot of time practicing before my next album, and rhythm playing and very controlled bending are at the top of the list.

Anyway, here’s the bridge into the lead break. Not a keeper track, shot this after I was done:

This was a fun solo for me, and honestly considering I’ve never really considered him an influence a few moments of this remind me a little of Eddie Van Halen, which is unexpected.

One of the arrngement things I tend to do, you can kind of hear here – a buddy used to tease me, with good justification, that I hate bridges and my music never has any, that the lead guitars never stop playing. For the most part he’s right, and that’s something I’ve tried to be better about on this one. One of the challenges though is when the lead guitar part drops out of a song, sometimes it can sound a little empty. You can address that to an extent with volume automation, turning the rhythm parts up, but if you’ve done a good job carving out separate spaces for the leads and the rhythm guitars, sometimes when you pull part of that away it feels like there’s a hole, independent of the volume. So, often times I’ll record a third track of that rhythm part, using the same settings as my lead sound, and just mix that quite a bit further back than if it was the melody part. It helps keep that section sounding “thick,” and like there isn’t a hole in the middle.

Anyway, I think this now means I have six songs out of ten recorded, though one of them of course was a short, simple sparse clean toned thing that barely counts. A little more than halfway, though, is probably fair.