Do You Think?

This song is an exercise in trying to take the most boneheaded riff possible and make it sound more complicated than it really is. The main guitar figure is just two alternating barre chords (played in drop D for even more simplicity) but it doesn’t really sound that way since the harmony is implied by the bass and melody. This isn’t exactly rocket science from a compositional perspective but I like the sense of swagger you can get from doing really simple stuff with conviction.

At one point this was going to have a vocal part but I simply couldn’t pull it off. The lead guitar melody is phrased to sound as close as I could get to the vocal style of Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age. If you like, you can imagine him going “Whoo-oo ooo hoo” along with the chorus lead guitar part.

This is the first time I’ve used Bogren Digital’s AmpKnob RevC on a recording and I think it works quite well. It’s a very simplistic (and cheap when it’s on sale, which it quite often is) capture of a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier which has already been “dialed in” and where the only control is gain. It’s very responsive and I like it for when I can’t be bothered to muck about with presets. Other plugins used include the Neural DSP Mark II, but most of the tones and effects came with Logic, including the whammy effect.

For the rhythm guitar parts I mostly used my Ibanez ARZ800 for that EMG-into-Mesa sound. Leads are a combination of the ARZ and the JEM. The bass is also in drop D and the drums are MIDI parts generated by Apple’s smart drummer software fed into EZDrummer.