basic recording is nora dunn/guitar solo details

26Nov07

We snuck in to the practice/recording space and finished up recording on Sunday. Did vocals for Satisfaction, Esperanto, Soiree, Lasers + Mirrors and Retrace Yr Steps, and guitar solos for Satisfaction and Esperanto. Sarah might post later so I’m not going to talk about vocal recording or being done that much, except to say that the hard drive on our computer died over the weekend and once we get it back I am going to start doing some mixes.

I would like to rap about guitar solos though. I had two solos to record. The solo for Satisfaction is a fairly traditional rock and roll solo, split into two sections. The first section is pretty much planned out at this point and I usually play the same thing or a variation on the same thing. The second section isn’t quite as standardized, though I typically start it the same way. I had hoped that my saxophone solo idea (see below) would work and it would take the place of the second section, but as indicated, that plan fell through. For the solo sound, I run straight into Sarah’s old 10-watt Squier practice amp and turned the gain up to get that shitty practice amp distortion sound. I put a SM57 about a foot away from the speaker, then opened the door to our practice space and pointed one of our powered overhead mics out into the large lobby area outside our space, getting a pretty good natural reverb sound. Recording this solo was a pain in the ass, mainly due to the unplanned second section, and I did a ton of takes before I had a brain spasm and decided to double the solo on two different tracks. This ended up sounding pretty awesome, as the two solos mostly follow along with each other well but diverge in interesting ways at some points. Meanwhile, Sarah and Ben sat out in the lobby and sent text messages to each other.

The Esperanto solo is basically noise, kind of a mid-’90s “I don’t give a fuck about solos” guitar solo. I stuck with the Squier amp but ran my guitar through the Rat and the delay pedal. I tried a few takes doing weird stuff with the delay pedal, using a really short loop to make annoying siren sounds, but it wasn’t really working, so I went with what I normally do when we play the song live, which is basically just make as much noise as possible without playing any actual notes. A hammer was involved. It’s pretty dense.

That is how you record guitar solos.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment