Where is This Going?

I tend to get more productive when I’m feeling frustrated. Music’s a great way of taking negative emotions and sublimating them into something more positive.

I like instrumentals that have lyrics (I’m pretty certain that “Liberty” by Steve Vai is an example, and that’s a killer tune). The human voice is much more engaging to listen to than pretty much instrument, and phrasing a melody as if it’s sung helps a lot with making it more memorable. Having a lot of extra harmony parts in the background also helps.

If you listen to the chorus part, you can hear there are a few more words added to the title phrase. Like I said, I was feeling pretty frustrated around the time I wrote this track.

The main lead guitar is my JEM, with the Sustainiac active throughout. The Sustainiac is great for getting 90% of the sound of a big, cranked amplifier with none of the noise complaints and I absolutely love it. Since I installed the system I’ve wired in a Fishman strat-style battery so the guitar is now rechargeable (warning: Maniac Music, who make the Sustainiac, say that it doesn’t work with the Fishman battery system, and I’m not sure why my experience is different). The main lead part is the SLO-100X plugin (pretty much unbeatable for this job) and the more processed harmony parts are Archetype Gojira and Archetype Plini.

The rhythm guitars are my two Solars; the cleans are a combination of the 8- and 6-strings. Due to the baritone scale length, Evertune bridge and Fishman Javier Reyes pickups, the 8-string actually sounds great for recording clean parts. The overdriven rhythm parts are doubled on both sides for a total of four parts; two of these tracks are barely there but they help the parts sound bigger and more “present”. The two main parts are the Bogren Digital AmpKnob Rev C and Archetype Gojira.

For the drums, I used both Logic’s built-in drummer and EZdrummer at the same time. Each plugin is on a single track with identical EQ and panning; it shouldn’t work but it sounds okay to me. The Apple drummer can be quite muddy and EZdrummer adds some definition.