It’s been a VERY busy month here, so this is really an update from two weeks ago. But, I wrapped up the second to last song on my album a few weeks back.
This was a relatively heavy – for me, anyway, and it’s arguably the heaviest song on this album – song that I wrote and entirely demoed on my Strat, and I wasn’t really sure what to do about guitars for it. While tracking rhythm parts, I did two takes with my Strat on the bridge singlecoil and then two tracks with my PRS Singlecut, and basically figured they’d probably sound pretty great layered against each other but I could work out which would be the dominant track down the road when I’d finished. Then, I startef seriously considering actually playing the lead part on my Strat, and went as far as going back and punshing in some feedback to the rhythm tracks so I’d have the option of using them as the dominant tracks after all. But, while trying out different guitars, I was actually surprised how similar the neck Suhr V63+ singlecoil in my Strat and the Dimarzio PAF Pro in a Genesis series RG550 I had sounded, and went back and forth for a while, but ultimately threw a second PAF Pro in the bridge (replacing an Evo2 that I liked, but didn’t love) with the aim of using that guitar for this song.
One, I’d forgotten just how much FUN it is playing a guitar with two closely balanced pickups; paradoxically it kind of encourages you to change positions a lot more. The Thornbuckers in my Suhr are very different from position to position, so you really hear the change when you switch positions, even when they’re well volume-balanced; the guitar sits in a very different frequency space. With a pair of PAFs, they still sound like a neck pickup and a bridge pickup, but they fall in kind of the same space in the mix. It turns out it’s kind of a blast.
Improvised solo over a different song of mine,some rough bits but I’m clearly having a lot of fun with this.
So, anyway, I had a guitar picked out. I don’t think I ever posted pictures of this one here (and it blows out my real camera’s sensor), so here’s a full shot:
This is reminding me I need to do some gallery updates when this is all over.
Anyway, this was a very fast paced, on-the beat song, and I’ve always favored looser, more flowing grooves, so this took a while to get right. The pre-chorus, in particular, really needed to be in the pocket. I shared some early rehearsal footage and this clearly wasn’t 100% there, but it’s kind of fun to see this crazy over the top looking guitar used to play something sort of, well, bluesy.
I’d never been fully enthused about the demo, and – having plenty of time to listen to the demos while working on the rest of the recording – increasingly one of the things that was jumping out at me was there was a timing issue in the chorus. The chorus opens with a short muted pickup and then a three note figure, and in the demo I played them straight and evenly. However, the rhythm guitar change was on an offbeat, so there was a tension in the way the melody line was working and the rhythm guitars and bass were working. I forget if this was already on my radar when I recorded the bass and rhythm guitars, but I also really liked how that figure “felt” (it was another of the writing elements that made me think of Nirvana a little, particularly Bleach era here) so I’d always planned to reconcile that in the melody somehow. It took some practice to really get the feel right, but the line now resolves on the off-beat, and I’d have to go back to the takes and solo them to be sure but at least some of the takes I tried had a very slight muted click on the downbeat before the resolution note, and I probably kept it in there – it kind of fit with the… prechorus before the prechorus, I guess, or second verse figure. But, the chorus never quite sat right on the demo, and flagging and slightly lagging that melody note made a world of difference.
I really ought to come back and add an audio comparison here – I’ll try to remember.
The problem with this one, after that, was I’d never written a solo. I’d just improvised something for the demo and while I really liked the first half, the second half wasn’t quite there. So, when it came time to record a solo, I relearned the first half (more or less), and then just started jamming over the top of the second, figuring if I improvised enough some ideas would come together. Eventually, they started to, so mostly to have a reminder for the morning I recorded a couple improvised takes. And, the first half of one and the second half of the other ended up being the keeper tracks – there was one line where I hadn’t landed on the last note with enough confidence so I went back and overdubbed just that one line, but very much to my surprise I was happy enough with the improvised section of that second take, that I just decided to keep it – it was a looser, sort of fusion-y breakdown in a faster, more driving song, and something about the flow just really worked.
After finishing the “main” solo, though, it felt like something was missing. The main solo itself I was happy with, but the little changeup at the end of the solo (which I’d actually recorded first, and was fully written out) where I switched to the bridge pickup for a more melody-line-like section… Somehow it sounded too small. So, I figured, why not go nuts with layers? I grabbed my acoustic to echo the electric guitar, added another layer with my Strat, an octave-up line at one strategically chosen place here and in the lead-in to the solo section (which I ended up playing on my Strat – for some reason that particular guitar lends itself to otherworldy warbling vibrato when sliding along on the G string, and it sounded better on that guitar than on anything else I tried it with), and since I had my acoustic out anyway, added sustained acoustic chords to the solo changeup and to the first chord every repeat of the chorus (a move that always makes me think of the Smashing Pumpkins, somehow)
The acoustic is poking out more than it will in the final mix here, but it felt silly to share a video of an acoustic guitar where you couldn’t really hear the acoustic guitar. It was a good opportunity to break out a Warm Auio WA87 R2 I’d picked up for single note acoustic lines, though I did still use a sE4400a for the chord parts.
It’s funny, I wasn’t 100% sure about this one, the demo felt a little rough and incomplete, but when it finally came together, that extra layering really helpef flesh things out and this went from one I expected to be one of the weaker tracks of the album, to one I’m actually rather proud of.
This very nearly WAS the last song on my album, while on a flight the weekend after this I listened a few times and felt like nothing was really missing… but then a few nights ago I found a rehearsal video of the beginnings of a solo for the song I wasn’t ure if I was going to include, and I think it has enough potential that I’m going to try to get it down. But, the end is VERY close now.
For now, I’m busy drum programming on the songs that still need it.
Drew Peterson 