Cathedrals

I’ve mentioned it a couple of times before, but as someone who was introduced to modern rock guitar by Joe Satriani’s The Extremist (before quickly discovering Surfing with the Alien and Flying in a Blue Dream), I’ve continued to have a huge affection for up-tempo instrumental rock tracks that are less about showing off, and more about establishing a strong melody and having some fun.

The guitars used were again my JEM and the Solar SBR1.6 AMP.  The Solar has a nice midrange chugginess which sits very nicely in the mix, and responds well to the sort of EQ which was all over the rhythm parts on Surfing…  Meanwhile the JEM cuts through nicely on the leads and is generally a little less polite than the Solar.  I mostly used the Archetype Petrucci plugin for the guitars; the lead tone gains a bit more prominence in the mix from a fairly heavy flange.  Drums are again EZdrummer 3.

I have also found myself using more and more of the EZmix 3 plugin.  This is another part of the Toontrack plugin suite which is intended to make it the process of turning a song idea into a decent-sounding demo without losing the writing flow while distracted with production duties.  I was originally pretty sceptical, but I have found it to be surprisingly good at producing a pleasant-sounding demo mix with the minimum of EQ-fiddling.  It also contains a bunch of pretty decent guitar and bass amp sims, so if you’re short on cash you could conceivably use it for everything; but so far I’ve been using it in combination with the Neural DSP suite.

So, why’s it called “Cathedrals”?  The answer is, I have been listening to a lot of CHVRCHES again, specifically the “Love is Dead” album which is probably closer to “Every Open Eye” than their other work and therefore very much my jam.  There’s a particular trick they tend to use when harmonising a melody that appears a lot on that album, which was very much in my mind when I was writing this track.  Not that I’ve necessarily even managed to reproduce it here, of course.