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Studio Log - Part 1 ( V 2.0 )
(22 Apr 02)
The session
Alrighty... now here is the actual "Studio Log" about the recordings with Wolfgang Malende. Wolfgang is a great country singer from Germany, and he invited me to come visit him at his "farm", where he has a studio too. I brought some guitar gear, but not too much, since he told me that he had some nice stuff there also. After all, this was not an officially booked session, rather an attempt of collaborating... kinda like rock (me) meets country (him). He then asked me if I had any songs in his style. So I played one of my songs to him, and we decided to record this.
Now, the studio is based on Logic Audio (you'll most of the time find either that or Cubase... or a completely analog studio). One of the advantages of Logic Audio is that you can use parts you recorded in a small studio, take them to another studio and import them into their Logic Audio (so you can use like a cool solo that you recorded for a demo, and re-use it for the more sophisticated recorded versions.)
First thing we recorded was a 6 string acoustic. I played each part separately, and therefore we now had a basic track for the whole song. The acoustic guitar was recorded through a mic pointed at the higher area of the fretboard. We added some reverb, and it sounded very nice. One of the difficult parts about recording an acoustic guitar is that you should not move too much in front of the mic. Each millimeter you move can make a huge difference in sound... so you either sit still or memorize your position, the distance between guitar and mic etc. Otherwise, one track will sound very different from the others... and that you wanna avoid.
Next, I added a 12 string acoustic, doubling the chords I played on the 6 string either an octave higher or lower. That added a shimmery effect to the whole thing, made it sound richer and fuller.
A little bit of advice on tuning a 12 string: pick each string with a thin pick and tune up with your tuner. Wolfgang´s comment when I started to tune up was "Have fun!"... but I was done rather quickly...
The bass was recorded on a synth, we decided to record a rather simple, gospel-like bass-line, since that seemed to be the most appropriate for the song (which is a ballad, by the way).
The setup for the electric guitar was: my Stevens Custom made Strat (with a Seymour Duncan Custom Custom humbucker, strings of choice were 009-042), through a Marshall JMP-1 preamp straight into the mixing desk (by the way, that Marshall is slightly modified, and offers a really good speaker-simulating output sound).
After I warmed up real quick and played around with the changes a bit, I decided to not use a lot of gain, and go for a more calm, "fragile" kind of solo. The intro melody consists of some slow, melodic tapping, some "harp harmonics" (if you know Steve Morse, Eric Johnson or Lenny Breau, you know those...), and some slight vibrato with the whammy bar.
After the first chorus, I played a variation on that, with a slightly changed ending. We left 4 bars without vocals or lead guitar, and decided to come back to that later...
The song features two B-parts (you might also call them "Pre-Chorusses"). Throughout the first one I played some Hendrix-inspired doublestop guitar with a crunch-sound, to the second I added some lines played with octaves. Both parts were recorded not too loud. They were supposed to add some dimension, some color, and therefore are just "the icing on the cake", instead of some loud, straight-in-your-face solo part.
Wolfgang is not only a singer, producer and arranger, he also plays guitar. He suggested to add some clean guitar to the second B-Part, very much in the style of Mark Knopfler. I used his 1968 Telecaster (with .011-strings!!!) for that.
To get some kind of a "Mark Knopfler"-effect, I hit the strings with my fingers instead of a pick. The difficult part about that is to keep the notes at about the same volume, which is not that easy when playing notes with hammer ons and pull offs. That idea of Wolfgang was great, the part blended right in.
I then came up with another idea for the second B-Part: I doubled the chords on the Tele, but played those chords with bigger intervals, like taking the third of those close-stacked voicings and playing them an octave higher. That part had a piano-like sound, especially since I picked the notes with my fingers.
The second session with Wolfgang happened about 2 weeks later. We had had some time to listen to the song, and decided to replace the intro solo with an nylonstring-guitarsolo. I came up with one that consisted of three segments.
The first one is a melody played by one guitar, the second one featured another overdubbed nylon string guitar, so you are actually hearing 2 guitars (the second doubling a third higher) and the third segment features three tracks of nylon string guitar, each one playing in a different tonal area.
Unfortunately I can not offer you any soundfiles right now, at least not until the song is officially published. That will happen by the summer of this year.
I hope you found this "Studio Log" at least a bit interesting, and I hope I was able to provide some tips on what to avoid in a studio situation. I will continue to write studio logs in the future, the next one will again be about a session I played with Wolfgang, and it will feature some soundfiles.
So stay tuned...
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Eric started playing the guitar at age 10. He attended GIT and studied with Scott Henderson, Brett Garsed, Dan Gilbert amo. Eric is involved in several bands and recording projects and his instrumental debut - Hidden Creek - plus his instructional book Talking Hands - A Guide To Contemporary Lead Guitar Techniques is available HERE
Visit his website at www.ericvandenberg.net
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