Guitars: Solos pt.2

I had really productive day yesterday and I recorded rest of the solos. So now I'm done with all guitar parts, I hope.

The next thing to do is to play the keyboards, which means some Hammond-style organs and synthesizer pads and effects. For the organ, I think that I will try out Strymon Lex with some distortion pedal combined with a synth instead of my trustworthy digital Hammond - organ drive - Ventilator combo. The Hammond is capable of producing a truly impressive sound, but I am kind of tired at it at the moment as I recorded Operation Majority's latest album with it not so long ago. For the synth parts I will most probably start with either Rolad JD-XA or Ambika. We'll see.

Yes, I have not discussed the vocals so far. I have some ideas for the melody lines, and I have absolutely no lyrics. So let's not discuss that any further.   

Guitars: Solos pt.1

Played solos for two songs this morning. Enough with that!

Here is one of them!

Guitars: clean parts

I recorded all the clean guitar parts today. Twice. I already practised it yesterday. I had recorded three songs already when I found out that the guitar was in tune with itself but not with the other instruments. Well, I think the end result got better and better on each iteration.

I have not mentioned it before, but I have one extra song in the album that I have not planned at all beforehand. It will be a spacey bit in the mood of Planet Caravan and alike. Let's see how it turns out. At least the guitar parts turned out fine.

And now the guitar solos... I'm not very enthusiastic, they are usually a pain to record. I end up sounding like a poor man's Iommi, and not in a good sense.

Bass: Pt. 2

I finished the bass tracks last Thursday. It took me four days to nail all songs down. In the end everything went very smoothly. The parts in the faster songs were just as difficult as I imagined them to be, so I had to spend a full day per song to record them. I do not play bass very much, so I had to restrict the playing into maximum of two two hour sessions per day to prevent damaging my hands.

Next week will be spent recording the clean guitar parts, some guitar effects and the solos. The solos will be a pain to record as my playing technique is what it is. 

Bass: Pt. 1

If rhythm guitars are the dull part, recording the bass must be the most fun part in the process. Just do your best Geddy Lee impersonation and take a few takes and you're done! Seriously. No offence to any real bass player, but I think bass is the easiest instrument to end up sounding good and lively without having a tremendously good playing technique. What I have learnt during past sessions is that the more you try to do fancy stuff and the more you just have fun, the better the end result sounds.

My original idea was to try LSTR fuzz with SansAmp Classic and try to find a kind of N.I.B. sound for the album. However, half-way in the process I accidentally dialled in a sound that reminded a lot of Steve Harris' sound, and after a few tests I decided that that's the way to go. So now I'm playing all the Iron Maiden licks that I can think of!

The only difficulties so far have been related to tuning. I'm using the drop c tuning (all strings full note down, and the lowest two full notes down), and with relatively loose strings it makes the tuning and intonation a bit iffy to say at least. I can not trust the meter, I just have to tune by ear, and sometimes even riff basis.

The bass I am playing is a Fender jazz bass copy hand built by myself from the parts that I gathered around the Internet.

4/7 songs done.

Guitars: Rhythm part

I have finished recording the rhythm guitar parts for the album. In total, it took me four days, a couple of hours work on each day. To be honest, this must be the dullest and least creative part of the whole recording process (not taking into account the editing part). I just listen to the demo tapes and try to re-create everything with a good touch. This is not the place for me to start changing the riffs or the order of them. The hardest part for me is to maintain the feeling of actually playing the song versus making everything very precise. If you focus too much on getting everything right, I loose the drive I get while playing more on top of the drums and forgetting about the details. I know pros can do both at the same time. Not me. So this is the excuse for the sloppy playing in the album.

I ended up using all the three guitars for the rhythm parts. The Les Paul with P90:s suited well for the slower songs with fuzzy sound, and I used the 335 copy for the mid-tempo songs. For the hardest and fastest songs, the Les Paul with EMG:s was the way to go.

Next, I will record the bass guitar parts. Or at least most of them. After the bass, I'll go back and record the missing clean and lead guitars.

About the time table

Yeah, I am on vacation from the work at the moment. I think that I should be able to nail the guitars and the bass down in the next two weeks and use the last week to do the keyboards and other effects. I will try to do some vocals, too, but I'm afraid that those have to be left for later. However, the album should be finished by the end of this year.

Guitars: The starting point

Now that the editing of the drums has been done, it is time to focus on the guitars. Some people might continue with bass or some other instruments, but for me, guitars are the obvious next step. In my playing style, the rhythm guitars are the most static (or to say the least improvised) part in the recording, so it is easiest to nail them down now.

As I said earlier, I chose to use two guitar tracks on the album instead of one. This makes me play everything two times (sigh), but allows also some harmonies and rhythmical variations to be played without additional instruments.

I have been using SansAmp Classic and some effect pedals for guitar recording in the past couple of years. Yes, it is a compromise between easier recording and mixing process and ultimate sound. During past years, I have found out that nailing a very good sound that is easy to mix with a regular amp and cabinet might be very tricky. You have to play really loud to get that power amp distortion, which means you have to play in a rehearsal room during night time, and usually you need to EQ the result heavily as the mic placement that you think was very good ends up being bad after all.

This time I thought I would use Catalinbread Sabbra Cadabra pedal in front of the SansAmp, while SansAmp would be set to provide an almost clean sound. Sabbra Cadabra is an analog emulation of the classic treble booster + Laney amp setup Iommi was using during the 70's. However, the pedal is capable of providing settings way over the ones Sabbath used, going far into compressed ultra high fuzz territory used in the modern stoner and doom albums.  I tried different sound settings, and ended up having a sound that is a bit fuzzy, but not too much so that I can still play the palm muted riffs. I put here a clip of the status so far.

I have three guitars I intend to use on the album:

- A black Warmoth "Les Paul". Actually it has a bolt-on neck and a fender scale so it is not very close to Les Paul in any way. It resonates very well, it is easy to play and it has high gain output because of the EMG:s.

- An amber Les Paul built by my friend. This guitar is very bright sounding and it has P90:s, so it is not a jack-of-all-trades kind of a thing. But it sings beautifully and I think I will record the clean parts with this one. 

- A black Edwards 335 copy. Compared to the Les Pauls, it has more mid range and mellower tone.

I tried recording all the guitars in a context of a same song. They naturally sounded different, but not so much that I couldn't mix the song with any of the instruments. So I think that I will end up using different guitars in different songs.

One thing I have been also thinking is whether to use other effects such as delay while recording the guitars or not. With effects, you get a better playing feel and touch, but you might end up in trouble while mixing. I thought that this time I do the main rhythm tracks dry, but use the effects for the other guitar parts and solos. 

Drums: Editing pt. 3

I finished the second round of the drum editing. After a couple of rounds of listening I bounced the tracks into complete songs, and now I'm done with that.

Next, I copied the drum tracks into a project file and tried a couple of different orders for the songs. After some trials, I think I found a suitable order where the faster and slower songs take their turns in a satisfactory manner. This is, of course, very preliminary as I have nothing else than the drum tracks to work with. It might be so that I need to change the order later on.

What next? I think that I have made a decision to use two panned rhythm guitar tracks on the album instead of one mono. This makes the processing of the stereo image so much easier during the mixing, especially as I intend to use synth and organ tracks panned in middle in most of the songs. In the two previous "band" solo albums I have used only one guitar and some phase manipulation methods to widen the track in left-right field. I will discuss the guitar part later in this blog.