Christmas isn’t just about snow and wellington boots and a big roaring fire; in fact that only really applies in the Northern Hemisphere. This song was written after a rather nice Christmas Day spent working on my tan. As it turns out, warm, laid back, summery sounding guitars actually go surprisingly well with sleigh bells.
I bought the SR1.6AMP because I decided needed a six-string guitar with an Evertune bridge to make it easier to record clearer, more in-tune rhythm parts which would sit nicely in a mix with the synthesised instruments I use for orchestration. In particular, I wanted to try out the Fishman Fluence Modern pickups, since I’d heard that they were both very noiseless and also quite versatile. I figured that I’d try to put together a quick demo song, using as many different pickup settings as possible, as part of the process of figuring out how I can incorporate this guitar into my recording process.
The distorted rhythm guitars were recorded using Otto Audio‘s II II II II, and the lead guitars and clean rhythm are Neural DSP’s Plini plugin. The harmony guitars use Logic’s built-in guitar presets. The drums are Toontrack’s EZ Drummer with the Drumkit From Hell sound bank, and the bass is my Ibanez SRX700 recorded using Neural DSP Parallax.
I thought I’d write up some first impressions of the SolarSR1.6AMP which I just picked up. I haven’t seen any reviews for this model online at all, so I figured somebody might find this helpful. This is a six-string superstrat with a set-through neck joint (I think? the website also describes it as a through-neck at some points) and Fishman Fluence Modern humbuckers, all topped off with a beautifully garish gold/metallic purple gloss colour scheme. The main selling point of Solars is that they use the Evertune constant-tension bridge across most of their higher-end models. The Evertune is an amazing piece of equipment which, in addition to keeping the guitar in tune, also dramatically improves the intonation in every position on the fretboard. As a result chords are much more pleasant to the ear, especially when playing with distortion. Not only were Solar early and enthusiastic adopters of the Evertune, they also work very hard to keep this very expensive and complicated piece of engineering from impacting the price of the instrument too much. As a result the SR1.6AMP comes in at about half the price of the closest equivalent Evertune/Fishman-equipped Ibanez RG, which is admittedly part of the Japanese-made Premium range but uses a cheaper and less ergonomic bolt-on neck joint.
This is another very Satch-esque track in the vein of something off “Unstoppable Momentum” or “What Happens Next”, with a bit of a twist in the form of an intro which channels the sort of guitar/bass tapping duet that Billy Sheehan is known for (with about 1/100th of the talent).
This one is all about rocking, but not too hard. Still, the revved-up surf rhythm guitars are present and correct, I think the tunes are catchy and it contains one of my most successful attempts at a harmonised guitar solo.
My JEM has been through some guitar surgery and, I’m pleased to say, come out stronger for it. The JEM 7VP has the bones of a great guitar, but there are some frustrating corners cut, and some hardware choices that I’m not the biggest fan of. A lot of this is personal preference; I must have spent hours gazing at the JEM page of the Ibanez catalogue in the early nineties, wishing I could afford the original JEM 7V.
This is the track which inspired the rest of the SHAKE project. I used my Ibanez ARZ in drop-D tuning for the rhythm parts and a mixture of the ARZ and my JEM for the leads. Plugins were ii ii ii ii by Otto Audio for the rhythm tracks, along with Parallax by Neural DSP for the bass, and a selection of Logic Audio’s builtin guitar effects on the lead and clean tones.
This is video game music for a 90’s-style FPS, heavily influenced by Sonic Mayhem and less heavily-inspired by Mick Gordon. The riffs carry the entire track and the leads are just there for atmosphere.
More to come in this series. I have an entire soundtrack’s worth of ideas in the pipeline.
This started out as an exercise in figuring out how to take advantage of the low strings of my 8-string. Then I added a coda which somehow turned into its own whole song. This was pretty heavily influenced by both Devin Townsend and Astronoid. Because MP3 players are still pretty bad at seamlessly transitioning between tracks, I’ve included both individual parts as well as the full, 11-minute, track.
This song is a bit of a Van Halen tribute. I have to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of their actual songs, but they were a bunch of amazing musicians with a unique sound, and whose influence can’t be overstated.
American music from that era exudes independence and confidence in a way which comes across as very silly and inauthentic when a non-American tries to do it. So rather than trying to write about getting a car and hitting the highway in pursuit of freedom, this song is instead about a pub crawl of North Oxford on public transport.
Sometimes, I just set an audio track to record and sing the first thing that comes into my head. In the case of this track, it was the “I need a beat…beat…beat….beat” line. After that, it was pretty much inevitable that this was going to turn into one of those songs that’s just about writing a song.
If you look through the track listing for the average 90s FPS soundtrack you end up with a combination of slightly trying-too-hard-to-be-tough titles (“Kill Ratio”) and stuff which is obviously just the name of the level (“Big Gun”). To stick with the boom-shoot theme of the SHAKE project, I’m trying to go with song names that sound suitably aggressive but aren’t really.
This track was one of the first things written with my Solar A1.8 and it seemed only appropriate to try to make it chug as hard as I could. I’ve already sung the praises of the Evertune system elsewhere, but this whole track would have been a complete mess without the near-perfect tuning and intonation it provides.
Mixing music which goes this low is a real challenge. It’s hard to keep the guitars and bass separated and sounding tight when they’re constantly intruding on each other’s part of the frequency spectrum. The high-pass filter got a real workout on this one.
