tl;dr - I've always just improvised solos when I record. In some ways that's not bad because I do think I'm a better player when improvising than playing something pre-arranged - my tough on the guitar seems more natural when I'm just adding little accents, and not thinking about it so much - but in others, I'm not going to just sit down and rip off a Satriani-quality solo by chance. So, one of my goals for this album was to try to actually write stuff, and learn it before going to record.
So...
https://drewpeterson7.files.wordpres...dea-in-e-1.mp3
EDIT - new outro, this is JUST the outro, not the full song, and with VSTs rather than real amps: https://drewpeterson7.files.wordpres...ea-outro-1.mp3
This is a VERY rough mix, and an even rougher drum sequencing job. There's a couple basic beats, and a few first-pass fills, and that's about it. The guitar performance i comped together while writing, starting by improvising until I got the basis of a solo I thought could be cool, and then coming back and refining the various runs and licks and whatnot until I had something that was both (I thought) kind of cool and interesting, and also repeatable - the legato run at the end of the main solo, for example, is going to take some practice to pull off consistently as it's fucking fast (I think 16th triplets at 140bpm) and in theory the way it lays on the fretboard it's something I should be able to pick, if I can get it tight enough, but as it stands now I could go pick up a guitar and pull off a credible version of this solo now, and if it wasn't exactly note for note, it'd be awfully close, which is a first for me. One of the things that occured to me after my last album is it would probably be extremely hard to play live, in part because everything was improvised, and in part because I approached it as a recording project, with no thought at all to how I'd go about juggling the various parts if I had to play them live. So that's kind of an objective this time around, to write and record an album that I could perform with just a bassist and drummer.
The lead guitar is reamped through my Mark V, though I've got some modest background ground hum thing going on when I run an out from my Apogee into the Mark and I feel like it's less distinct than when I plug directly in, so I don't think reamping is going to go much past writing and demoing for me (it fucking rules for that, though, there was a solid week where I'd come back in the morning, listen to the melody sections, and decide that one particular note needed to change, or I needed to punch in a resolution somewhere that wasn't in the original demo, etc etc etc. It's a very liberating way to write, though not a way I think I would ever want to record a final take for some of the same reasons that I like it when I'm hashing out ideas.)
Theres a couple little details in here I'm actually kind of proud of that I'll be curious if anyone picks up on. The whole arrangement is, well, very influenced by Andy Timmons.
Anyway, the mix is pretty crude, and I'm sure I can get better tones on tape when I record this for real (if nothing else, the strings on my Suhr were pretty dead by the end of this, and the strings on my bass are YEARS old), but I'd love some feedback on what's working and what's not for the arrangement, the writing, the solo, whatever. Just imaginer it with slightly more interesting drums, since I've put next to no work into them.
So...
https://drewpeterson7.files.wordpres...dea-in-e-1.mp3
EDIT - new outro, this is JUST the outro, not the full song, and with VSTs rather than real amps: https://drewpeterson7.files.wordpres...ea-outro-1.mp3
This is a VERY rough mix, and an even rougher drum sequencing job. There's a couple basic beats, and a few first-pass fills, and that's about it. The guitar performance i comped together while writing, starting by improvising until I got the basis of a solo I thought could be cool, and then coming back and refining the various runs and licks and whatnot until I had something that was both (I thought) kind of cool and interesting, and also repeatable - the legato run at the end of the main solo, for example, is going to take some practice to pull off consistently as it's fucking fast (I think 16th triplets at 140bpm) and in theory the way it lays on the fretboard it's something I should be able to pick, if I can get it tight enough, but as it stands now I could go pick up a guitar and pull off a credible version of this solo now, and if it wasn't exactly note for note, it'd be awfully close, which is a first for me. One of the things that occured to me after my last album is it would probably be extremely hard to play live, in part because everything was improvised, and in part because I approached it as a recording project, with no thought at all to how I'd go about juggling the various parts if I had to play them live. So that's kind of an objective this time around, to write and record an album that I could perform with just a bassist and drummer.
The lead guitar is reamped through my Mark V, though I've got some modest background ground hum thing going on when I run an out from my Apogee into the Mark and I feel like it's less distinct than when I plug directly in, so I don't think reamping is going to go much past writing and demoing for me (it fucking rules for that, though, there was a solid week where I'd come back in the morning, listen to the melody sections, and decide that one particular note needed to change, or I needed to punch in a resolution somewhere that wasn't in the original demo, etc etc etc. It's a very liberating way to write, though not a way I think I would ever want to record a final take for some of the same reasons that I like it when I'm hashing out ideas.)
Theres a couple little details in here I'm actually kind of proud of that I'll be curious if anyone picks up on. The whole arrangement is, well, very influenced by Andy Timmons.
Anyway, the mix is pretty crude, and I'm sure I can get better tones on tape when I record this for real (if nothing else, the strings on my Suhr were pretty dead by the end of this, and the strings on my bass are YEARS old), but I'd love some feedback on what's working and what's not for the arrangement, the writing, the solo, whatever. Just imaginer it with slightly more interesting drums, since I've put next to no work into them.

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