Recording Diary 2: Rhythm Guitars

Tonight, Troy and I finally got the chance to sit down and record some rhythm guitars along with the drum tracks that Chris recorded a month or so ago. It may seem that there was quite a gap (say, month-long) between drums and guitars, but this time of year there's a lot to schedule, and there was a lot of work to do just going through drum tracks.

So, the first thing we did was gather some tools together:

First off, we recorded the song "In the Wake of Fear", which we've been playing for years. The main guitars for me were the green TW Manalishi and the 1979 Les Paul Standard. Troy used his Les Paul Studio and Jackson Soloist. It's a very little-known fact that Troy did everything he could to sell me that Soloist back in 1999 or 2000. It's a phenomenally good guitar that I should have bought. Thankfully, Troy bought it, and it's one of his most cherished guitars. That's for good reason. It's a tremendously good sounding guitar. 

I used my "Green Manalishi" guitar that I built last year. I don't really claim a lot of credit for that guitar sounding good, but it sounds good. It's a neck-through guitar, with a 5-piece mahogany/maple neck with a walnut body. It brings a special midrange body to the recording, along with a huge low end and articulate highs. 

For secondary tracks, I used my 1979 Les Paul Standard and Troy used the aforementioned Jackson. With 4 tracks of guitars, In the Wake of Fear sounds huge. 

One thing of note is that, due to modern technology, we're able to record the guitar tracks without committing to a particular sound. What we're doing is recording direct with amp simulators. What that means is that the raw performance is captured directly from the guitar, which can be then fed to the amplifier when we choose to record live tracks. 

After "In the Wake of Fear", we hit "Inversion (Streets of Fire)". That's a dropped D tune, so Troy used his Jackson Adrian Smith and Les Paul while I used my Green Manalishi and LP Standard. That was somewhat more work, as it's a considerably newer, more intricate song. As often happens with recording, we kept working until we were nearly microscopically viewing the guitar tracks. At a certain point, you have to let it go, particularly with a tune like this. We doubled the guitars in the chorus, and for that I detuned my E string to D, and my B string to G, just to add a little resonance. Troy's Jackson offered up a free 'G' in the rhythm for his solo, which accidentally added a lovely bit of life to that section. I don't know exactly where that G came from. It could have been a ringing tremolo spring or something. I listened back to the raw guitar track a couple of times before I realized two things:  

A. I couldn't tell where there G came from. 

B.  It sounded awesome. 

So there it is, as far as I'm concerned, forever printed on the yet untitled Rule 17 album.