The task for August’s Guitarist Home Recording Collective was to:

The task is to compose a piece of music where the main melody/lead part/ must have a minimum number of two notes played at all times.

ie NO single notes will be allowed.

I had recently obtained August’s Computer Music magazine which features a cover disc with loads of free Chilled/Lounge audio samples/beats/loops etc.

A quick browse through them I found a beat which inspired me to create a more chilled/ambient piece for this month’s task.

To begin with, my usual approach, I quickly created just a drum backing using the loop in Cubase to play some ideas over. My initial thinking with the ‘minimum of two notes’ was to have a rhythm backing which used triads of the form:

C - x-3-x-x-5-3
D - x-5-x-x-7-5
Em - x-7-x-x-8-7

etc.

which have a nice quailty to them with defined high notes combined with supporting bass root note. Forms favoured in many styles, by Martin Taylor, Beatles’s ‘Blackbird’ etc.

I came up with the simple progression Bm - C - G which worked over the backing loop. The guitar was run through the POD set to the Line6 Layer patch for a crisp cleanish with a touch of tremolo.

Prog 1

As it stood the guitar part sounded a bit stark to my ears and really didn’t have the vibe I wanted, so I fiddled around with a few plugins and found one in my Waves package called ‘Mondo Mod’. This cool plugin can be used to swirl audio around the stereo spectrum, processing the guitar in Prog 1 and adding a touch of compression gave me:

Prog 1 (processed)

Deciding to use this as the backbone for the ‘verse’ I tried out a couple of ideas for a ‘chorus’ and quickly came up with the following 8 bars, keeping use of the Mondo Mod for depth:

Prog 2

With these two backings I now had a framework to work on adding melody lines.

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

Now being fairly satisfied with the guitar sound I started to work on arranging the piece in Cubase SX.

First thing to do was to calculate the tempo.

Listening to the loop section I came to the conclusion that the loop consists of two bars of 6/8. Armed with this info, right clicking on the loop in Cubase SX and activating hitpoints I was able to calculate the bpm to be ~65 bpm. This now allowed me to accurately create sections, loops in Cubase’s Project Window. In order to ensure clean joins between loop sections I also had to chop off the silence at the start and end of the main loop.

Next I decided on the layout for the whole piece, opting for:

| intro | head | head | solo | head | outro |

Over the head and solo sections the following chords, as mentioned in Part 1, were used:

|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 F#13|Am7b5 D7#9|Gm7 C7|Gm7 D7b5#9|

For the outro I wanted something different, wanting to end on an upbeat vibe by resolving to FMaj7, therefore I came up with:

|Gm7 F#13|Am7 D7|Gm7 C7|FMaj7 |

Now that the structure was there, I recorded the backing guitar over the drum loop coming up with the following:

‘head’ backing

Once the backing was finalised I had a foundation with which to build on. Next task, to come up with a melody/head.

Tried a different mic position last night, with mic pointing at join of neck and body but mic at 12 inches from guitar, noodling away I recorded:
Acoustic Recording Test #1

A touch of compression and reverb was added to beef things up.

Less of a ‘boxey’ sound this time. It’s getting there .

The task for May’s Guitarist Recording Collective was to use a collection of provided Jazz style samples of bass, drums etc. to create a track using at least one sample.

Now that I have unpacked all my necessary recording bits n bobs I decided to give this one a go. Recently I’ve trying to incorporate some Jazz into my playing .

Listening to the provided samples I wasn’t too impressed with the chord progression so decided to come up with my own and hopefully create a track using the supplied drum loop.

I also decided to record all guitar parts using an acoustic, for that intimate Jazz Cafe vibe.

So, the chord progression.

I’ve been faffing around recently with certain minor Jazz ii - V - i progressions and opted to use this resolution in the piece. Therefore currently the progression goes something like (very roughly):

||:Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 F#13|Am7b5 D7#9|Gm7 C7|Gm7 D7b5#9:||

This should give me plenty of scope to create a main melody/head and then noodle for a bit.

Last night I started trying various ways of mic’ing/recording the acoustic. The Fylde I’m using is fitted with a Headway pickup so I wanted to use this in the recorded signal.

The reason being since I’m only using a Shure SM58 to record the acoustic ( currently saving up for a nice Condenser mic ) using the DI from the guitar should add a wee bit more top end.

I setup the mic to point @ the join between the neck and the guitar body and recorded a small snippet of some playing to check. I noticed that with too much of the DI signal the sound was very ‘boxey’, so tamed that down a bit which improved things slightly.

I tried the usual listen on monitors then listen on headphones to check the sound and felt that the sound was maybe a touch too bassy, possibly I was too close to the mic. A quick read of Recording and Production Techniques by Paul White revealed I should maybe try a distance greater than 12 inches or so.

Tonight I’ll give this a go and maybe try another mic position.

I’ve decided to create a Recording Journal for each composition I’ll be working on in the future.

This will act as a notebook detailing steps taken, lessons learned etc. primarily as a reference for myself but hopefully useful to others as well .