Day 11
Recording: More Rhythm Guitars
Tim
Attempting to match the awesomeness of Greg’s rhythm parts myself is just like trying to slay a dragon with naught but fishhooks. Greg’s sound was perfect, his playing was perfect, and now I had to do the same.
The first task: finding an equally face-melting (yet complimentary) tone as Greg’s. I shall not reveal our extremely mysterious method used to achieve this, but mind you, it was a success.
The next task: tracking with the same exacting precision as Greg. As in all metal albums, a lot of the rhythm guitars are simply doubled. In some bands (such as Iced Earth), one person simply plays both rhythm guitar tracks. This is not so in Burning Shadows; Greg and I each play our guitar tracks separately. Throughout the album there are many rhythm parts where Greg and I part ways and play different guitar lines, as well. This is where the tone of the two rhythm guitars becomes important. My sound must fit well alongside Greg’s, but it must be its own entity when the guitars do their own thing.
With a great deal of effort and caffeine, my rhythm parts went by without much despair. In fact, I’m amazed I got my hand to move that fast in “Part 2”.
Dragons slain and fishhooks bloodied, I returned to my chamber victorious that night.
Day 12
Recording: Clean Guitars
Tim
It’s Presidents’ Day, which means I have the day off. For our fans outside of the US, Presidents’ Day was originally a day to honor George Washington’s (and later, Abraham Lincoln’s) birthday. Now it is celebrated as a day off of work so you can take advantage of sales at furniture stores. It’s also a good day to record some clean guitars.
Good clean guitar tones are somewhat elusive. We have discussed the face-melting tones of the rhythm guitars, but usually the face-meltingest amps don’t necessarily provide the best sounds for clean guitars. Live, I usually leave all my clean guitar sounds to my Boss GT-10, essentially taking my amp’s preamp out of the equation. In the studio, I decided to go down a similar — but not identical — path. However, my GT-10 is in the shop (too much metal for one floorboard), so I made use of my GT-6, which is slightly better than half as good!
To spread out and thicken the sound a bit, it’s important to use stereo effects. In this case, I used light flange and light chorus. Now comes the tricky part: playing the parts flawlessly in one take. If you have to do a punch in, it might end up sounding weird because you might be punching in at a different part of the flange cycle. Many many takes and lots of cussing later, the clean parts for the whole album were done, and I was off to buy a new credenza.