Hahahah right on, I got a kick out of it. The first 3x I just bombed all over the place, I barely use the talk box and getting the technique with the tube is a bit of a learning curve; if you close your mouth too much the volume drops out and you practically have to know how to circular breath like a wind instrument player to use the thing. I end up holding my breath almost the whole time because paying attention to your breathing, manipulating your mouth/talk box while trying to play the right notes is like riding a unicycle while juggling while balancing a pole on your nose.
I’m a wah junkie and have it on so much stuff as it is already, it’d definitely work in a couple spots, but listening to the songs that I‘m pretty sure are going to be on the album, there’s a lot of wah already. Like Kirk Hammett levels of wah use. Actually, I’ll jump to Kirk’s defense over his wah use because if we compared song-to-wah ratios, I think I have him beat.
I
might layer it behind the take I’m definitely keeping in there, just mixing it in and out at specific times, or if it works, crossfade the two takes together. We’ll see how adventurous I get (by adventurous I mean baked). There’s
a lot of guitar tracks in this song and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the phrase “walls of talk box guitars” but it could apply to this song. For each chorus I doubled tracked the talk box stuff, just playing the B/A chords and part way through start incorporating some of the lyrics into the talk box, it’s either going to sound really f*cking cheesy or mildly interesting.
So far, in just the pre-chorus/chorus there’s-
2 tracks of the cleanish Superlead
2 tracks of slide guitar using a Gilmour PULSE tone, like in ”One Of These Days”
2 tracks of talk box
2 tracks of an Ebow playing a melody over the chords
2 tracks of the Freqout playing a harmony to that melody above
2 tracks of slide playing that melody
2 tracks of acoustic
An organ
A mellotron
Strings
Choir voices
And somehow, there’s still a ton of space in there for vocals, which consists of the main vocal melody and a counter-melody to it underneath/along with it. Using a Strat for everything and just switching pickups eliminated the need to EQ the sh*t out of everything, that’s definitely a benefit of single coils because if I did that with humbuckers I’d need to EQ everything to give everything it’s own space. Just panning everything into it’s own spot seems to have done the trick. The verses are just a single, mono guitar track, so when it opens up to the pre-chorus it
really opens up.
I’m really anxious to hear this completed because it’s been stuck in my head for months now. I started writing this the day I found out Taylor Hawkins passed and while I’m only a casual Foo Fighters fan, I absolutely love Taylor’s playing in that band. Over the last couple of months it’s gone from sounding like Hawkins playing in RHCP to Foo/RHCP/Devin Townsend doing their best to write a Floyd song, with Mike Portnoy coming in at the very end for some over the top drum fills. I had an idea to do something cool with the drums at the end, I was initially thinking along the Danny Carey lines, but after seeing the Petrucci/Portnoy vids a few weeks ago I spent the night programming some very obviously Portnoy-influenced fills at the end.
As long as I don’t get too hammered tomorrow, I’ll start vocals on Friday and can hopefully have this banged out before the weekend is over. However, Nacho is coming over tomorrow and we don’t generally stay sober for very long when we’re together.
