Guitar Gear

Last night, I finally finished re-recorded a solo for a song I’ve been working on releasing (Great God). The original solo was actually pretty good, but because of some errant picking on my part, there some distracting “extras” that I could easily wave edit away. So I decided to re-do the solo entirely. But that’s not the painful part. The painful part is actually physical. I ended up doing over 200 takes over the past couple of nights to get the solo just right. It’s still not perfect, but it’ll do for now… I need to rest my fingers a spell…

With my first set of takes, I duplicated the original solo. This only took a few takes to get it right. But then, I had a bit more complicated of a solo in my head, and it just wouldn’t let me settle. The only problem was that I had to learn how to play it! If you listen to the solo, it’s not a very difficult solo for anyone with the technique. I could actually play it myself from a technical standpoint, but the challenge for me was to play it entirely clean, without any added “touches.” It’s amazing how playing in overdrive masks out those little mistakes! A brush with the pick here, a mis-fingering there, and it just messes up the phrase, not to mention bending strings to just the right pitch. Playing clean, you can’t hide behind any kind of signal breakup.

So I used this recording session as much for recording as I did for a practicing clean technique; and this is where the pleasure kicks part kicks in. I still need to re-record the solo because I missed some pitch bends, but I’ve now learned some new technique that I can employ in other songs…