Ominous

The idea was to have two lead guitar melodies in conversation with each other. If anything, though, my favourite part of this track is the backing, which comes across as nicely claustrophobic.

This piece starts out both subdued and tense. I had the option to keep it that way, constantly circling back on itself, but I don’t really like music that makes a thing out of never resolving and frankly I felt like a bit of catharsis.

Production-wise, the rhythm guitars are again my two Solars. They’re a fantastic foundation for any track, again due to the combination of Evertunes and Fishman pickups. The last thing you want to do is get tens of tracks deep into a recording, retune your guitar, and realise that everything that you’ve put down is out of tune. Of course, there’s always Melodyne but it’s better just to get things right the first time. The lead is my JEM.

The Plini plugin got a workout this time round, because I wanted to use fuzz rather than overdrive for the leads, and Plini has probably the most convincing fuzz pedal of all of the Archetype plugins I own. I also really like the octave effects. The one thing it doesn’t have, though, is a flanger, and so the first lead part you hear is actually one of the stock Logic Pro fuzzes going into Archetype Petrucci, which sounds suitably nasty.