Very quick update today, as I’m mostly re-learning the melodies and solo for another song at the moment, and figuring out what to do about a fill that wasn’t in the demo but really should have been.

“Ghost Dance” was originally conceived of as sort of an Andy Timmons-like three-piece, with bass, drums, and a single guitar part. But, talking about the demo with a guitarist buddy whose opinion I trust, I floated the idea if maybe adding some sparse strummed acoustic parts to the prechorus and chorus, and he was enthusiastic on the idea. And, I’m a sucker for layering anyway, so…

That’s now become two tracks of acoustic (one ribbon, one large diaphragm condenser), and then a Strat rhythm track and a PRS rhythm track, where – another fun thing with reamping!) I’m using a tempo-aligned tremolo effect to push a soft-strummed guitar into a gritty amp in and out of distortion. Love that sound, never been able to do it… But it should be pretty easy reamping. In any event, realistically that’s probably too much and some of them will end up on the cutting room floor in the mixing stage (I’ll have a lot more to say on arrangments at some point in this process, but for now, a good mix becomes exponentially easier with a well thought out arrangement – this post is just scratching the surface there), but its easy enough to just mute things you don’t need later on, than wish you had something thay wasn’t there.

Finally, though, in my head I could kind of hear a clean-toned guitar, panned off to one side, echoing the pre-chorus melody line. Since this is a Strat-driven song, and since I like Strats anyway for this sort of thing, my first thought was my sunburst Strat in position two.

To my ears, this is all wrong:

It’s very prominent, kind of spikey, and even smashing it with a compressor, the dynamics are more prominent than the neck-position Strat melody line, which with the melody line itself being the “hook” and the focal point of the mix here, that’s a bit of a problem.

However, the same thing played on my PRS Singlecut, with either the bridge or neck humbucker, sits much better:

You miss it if you aren’t listening (and, it’s a couple decibels louder here than the Strat was). It’s darker, thicker, less spikey, and the dynamics are very well controlled (this is a guitar I bought from a buddy of mine who also liked how it sounded but it absolutely didn’t work for his band, precisely because it does tend to sit back and thicken things, and as I type this up we’re texting about this guitar, how it sits in a mix, and then now Telecasters and Danny Gatton, because why not). It’s the kind of detail that’s easy to miss, but especially with headphones, it’s in there.

I won’t go deep into my arrangement philosophy here, but I’ve always loved the… let’s call it “augmentation” part of the songwriting process, where you have a song hashed out more or less in full, but there’s still room to go back and come up with tiny little supporting parts to add to it and fill things out a little. Doing that is a lot of fun, but you also have to be careful to make sure that nothing you do gets in the way of what makes the song “work,” and whatever the focus of the song is, the “hook” that’s driving your arrangement, be it a cool bassline, or a guitar or vocal melody, or a strummed chordal part… whatever you’re doing is supporting that and augmenting it, but not really taking attention away from it in any way. Here, I think part of that is if you’re adding a line that’s already in the same register as the lead melody, even panned out of the center, you really need to keep the dynamic “energy” of the part sitting well behind the hook. Here, I started with the Strat, could immediately tell it wasn’t going to sit right, and basically just copied the same FX chain into a new track then overdubbed the same part with (ultimately, after trying both pickups) the neck position of my PRS, and even when I then bypassed a compressor that no longer felt like it was needed, the part “glued” into the lead line, rather than jumped out over it.

A lot more to come on this subject at some point, I do expect to do longer posts on writing and arranging as I work through mixes here. For now though, I’m still chipping away, and while these were pretty minor overdubs and minor updates in the process of finishing an album, I think little details like this are a lot of fun and kind of exciting for me, so I wanted to share an update.