Guitarist Recording Collective: July 2005

The July task for the Guitarist Home Recording Collective was to:

Compose a tune where the melody or lead bit if you want can be played no faster than 120 bpm. In other words two notes per second is your speed limit. Obviously this doesn’t apply to the drums but to the guitar, bass, keyboards etc.

With this restriction I immediately thought about creating a really heavy riff based piece, though had no idea what to play over the top.

To get things going I got out my 7 string and switched on the POD, finally settling on preset patch 5B ( modern hi-gain, modelled after Soldano X88 preamp ) for the guitar tone. Gave enough gain grunt with clarity over the low power chords on the 7 string.

Setup-wise the POD was then fed into the line-in socket of the Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card which sits nicely in my Alienware laptop running Cubase SX.

I decided to beef up the actual guitar sound by recording a take and panning it left then repeating the process, playing with the initial track, and panning right. Essentially doubling up the part.

Trying to come up with riffs with the guitar on its own at times seems too stale to me so I tried a few ideas over a few of the supplied loops with BFD. The Metal patterns were ‘ok’ but not quite what I had in mind until I found the ‘Dark Rock’ sample bank.

That’s the one!

Now armed with a drum backing the riff ideas came quick and fast and I started recording down each idea. Quickly I came up with the following two:

Riff idea #1

Riff idea #2

Now that basic gist of the piece was there, what to have playing over the top and having just the rhythm track would be a tad repetitive.

I had the idea to have some speech/quotes playing over the backing, initially of someone maybe talking about ‘Man as a animal’ or somesuch, quick google for such samples gave up nothing but searching for lecture MP3 turned up Gene Sharp Lecture on Civilian-Based Defense.

Exciting stuff ;).

Importing the audio from the lecture into Cubase I listened through it all and grabbed choice phrases to play over the guitar backing. The vibe and feeling of the piece taking on a darker slant.

I opened the piece with a quote and ended with another, the first setting up the initial mood and the final quote hopefully ending with an brighter message.

So the first mix contained the drums, guitar and sampled lecture and needed very little EQing. I added some compression, Waves RComp set to Voiceover setting, to the lecture samples to balance out the levels and left the guitars and drum parts ‘as is’. Sounds from POD and BFD sounded perfectly fine to my ears.

To be honest I could have left it there but I decided to add a bassline with my 5 string bass to really fatten up that low pounding feel also adding a couple of single line fills to break up the ’space’ in a couple of sections.

The final master was tweaked using the Waves L1 Ultramaximizer + plugin to provide global level maximization and peak limiter, adding a final sheen.

All done in an evening, the piece was finally named ‘Conflict’ and can be heard here