Writing this after spending my daughter’s nap re-recording a clean harmony line (sort of? It’s unison, but its a clean echo of a distorted lead line) to make sure the intonation was really right (which is sometimes tricky with different guitars, especially when one is a Strat with an adjustable bridge but the other is a PRS with fixed intonation on a wraparound a stop-tail) and then mixing down a few clips for this post, but I THINK this song is in pretty good shape. Couple things to talk about in this post, beyond the intonation comment above.

I guess first, I’ll say that when I wrote this one, after a few listens I began to be less and less happy with the second half of the “verse” figure. I use that word loosely as this is a very loose, open, “jam”-y sort of song, something I like but feel like you get one, maaaaaaybe two tops an album before it just starts to sound like maybe your phoning in the songwriting. Listening, increasingly I felt like the figure as I’d originally written it started to ascend into a new register but then dropped back down, and it made the whole thing sound kinda same-y. So, as I began re-learning this one, I also started messing around with different themes for the second half there. In the demo (and on one or two points elsewhere on this album) I’d done a few lines along the G string with a wide, fast, exaggerated vibrato that gave it kind of a spacey, surreal feel, so I decided I wanted to run with that. I recorded a bunch of iphone video as I was working to go back and listen to after the fact – this isn’t how I’d written the rest of the album where I was just recording audio, but i didn’t want to do dozens of extra takes over the final project files, and I figured it would be fun to share as I worked anyway. So, here’s a video from pretty close to the end of the process, where it was close to what I had in mind, but I ended up making a few slight changes before I recorded it:

This was on my sunburst Strat – from the outset I knew this was going on my silver Strat, but I’d already thrown freshh strings on that one, and I wanted to preserve them until I was ready to record (I’d already cut the bridge rhythm figure by then).

Ultimately, the two parts were’t THAT different – in some ways, remarkably close, I think the original was still in the back of my head as I was doing this – but up one, and in some places two octaves, and with a much wider, less guitar-like vibrato.

Before:

After:

I guess another note about these – you can hear a clean rhythm guitar in the background of the original. It’s still possible I’ll go back and add one, but I, well, forgot about it while recording the rhythm parts, and when I noticed it while relearning the song, ultimately decided to record it with my acoustic. I’ve been keeping notes about which guitar was used on what and, for the acoustic parts, things like mic and position selection, and initially couldn’t find the pertinent notes (I thought the rest of the acoustic was a later overdub and it wasn’t, it was from the original acoustic tracking) and figured I’d used the SE Electronics VR1. So I pulled that oiut and had a hell of a time getting the guitar to sound the same, and then after recording the part remembered it was actually from the earlier session, went back and checked, and sure enough it was actually the SE4400a. A couple quick takes, and it sounded seamless – just in time to take off and pick a buddy up at the airport, timing it within a minute. I got lucky there! But, while there’s a lot of good ways to record an acoustic guitar… a C414-style mic at the neck joint fret DOES sound awfully good on strummed guitar.

The other writing change I made here was on the solo – in hindsight, I felt like the opening of the solo for this song, and then the C#m song with another similar bridge lead-in, were too similar. So, I didn’t change much, but I made a few changes to the opening, leading into the first couple nots with a legato figure and then rather than returning to the root bending to the minor 3rd, and then that first couple lines felt a little rhythmically repetitive so I finished the last of them a little differently before the two big bent notes.

For perspective, here’s the video I shot for this song, almost two years ago, while I was ramping up the writing for this project:

…and, not wildly different, but this is what it sounds like today:

I also ran into a little reamping hurdle working on this – suddenly even with the ground loop lifted I was getting steady background hum, unrelated to send level or whether anything was being delivered to the amp. I’d rearranged my room since I last reamped anything, and as it turns out, if the computer and amp weren’t both run off the same outlet, it was generating some hum. It wasn’t too bad on loud full-bore guitar, but the delicate melody at the end of the solo was obtrusive… and layered across five or six tracks of guitar it would have been overbearing. Problem solved, though.

More work to come, but I’m down to three tracks to go.