Blokes With Guitars

[crumhorn]

Ingredients: 4 silver haired gentlemen, 2 guitars, 1 bass, 1 keyboard, 1 copy of Live 8 suite, Beer, weed, tea and coffee to taste.

Method: Combine all ingredients and jam for several hours. Leave to stand. Carefully sift out the tasty bits. Loop, layer and reassemble in various combinations, adding effects and new drums as required.

Result: half a dozen ideas that might eventually turn into finished tracks.

Here's one that we've been working on that I'm quite pleased with. Just guitars and drums on this one, my keyboards were not helping at all!

http://www.sharehost.co.uk/Live/bwg1.mp3

The rest still need a bit of work to get them to this stage. Once we get them all up to the same level as this we'll start to think about where to take them next. maybe add more instruments/vocals etc or just think of proper titles for them and leave them as they are.

[tlennon]

Less than 1 minute into it and I started writing this comment. What can I say......SMOOTH.....You see what a little weed can do? I already have some lyrics and melody to it. Of course the tune is so generic that almost anything will go with it. Some mixing and maybe some more instrumental and voala.....a hit. Excellent tune guys.... you may now take a bow.

[crumhorn]

Less than 1 minute into it and I started writing this comment. What can I say......SMOOTH.....You see what a little weed can do? I already have some lyrics and melody to it. Of course the tune is so generic that almost anything will go with it. Some mixing and maybe some more instrumental and voala.....a hit. Excellent tune guys.... you may now take a bow.

Nice one, thanks a lot.

Feel free to post back a version with vocals dubbed on

[gjm]

That was really cool. I absolutely dig the whole tone of that recording.

A few questions if you don't mind?

Was this all done in Live? Care to name the 3rd party stuff used if any?

What are you using for drums? They sound so good.

[crumhorn]

Thanks for the comments.

The whole track was done in Live, no third party plugs.

Overall effects are a Reverb and a Ping Pong on returns A and B used on the guitar parts and the "Vintage Mastering 1" rack on the master track.

The guitars both went through dual channel Fishman combo with each channel DI'd into my Firepod. These were cut up and looped and turned into four separate guitar tracks. Three of these have no extra processing at all, the main melody guitar track goes through the "Guitar Space" effect rack - which has a control marked "goose" . Not sure if there was any reverb used on the Fishman.

The fretless bass went straight into the Firepod and is processed through the "Bass Preamp and Tone" effect Rack.

The drums are session drums "British Vintage Stick" processed through a bit of EQ 8 and the "Vintage Finalizer" rack.

I think that's everything

Interesting how often the word "Vintage" crops up. Definitely a selection bias on my part I think - not sure if it really means anything in terms of sound.

[gjm]

Thanks crumhorn for the details.

I must have listened to this 10 times today. It just hit the right nerve. To me there is a wonderful overall sound going on. I have been struggling to find my own sound. I have been struggling with Live. You have given me confidence that if I carry on working away at this that I can, using Live, make music that moves me.

All the best. G.

[leedsquietman]

Very nice sound quality. Laid back feel, drums work well. The bass could use a small +1 to +2 dB boost IMHO, otherwise a pretty perfect mix. Good job.

[crumhorn]

Thanks guys!

@gjm, I'm still learning my way around Live Suite myself. This is easily the best track I've done as regards sound. I think it comes from the fact that the guitars are both really beautiful instruments (A Taylor T5 - which I think is one of the most versatile guitars ever - and a Parker Acoustic), and I left the guitar sound effectively untouched apart from adding a bit of reverb and echo. I think it's one of those times when I relearn the lesson that "Less = More".

I often get the feeling that the more I work on something the worse it sounds. I can Spend hours trying to apply just the right reverb on the snare only to decide in the end that I've ruined it and it sounds better without.

Also I think the Abe's Vintage Mastering chain is a work of genius. A hell of a lot of work must have gone to creating the Macro controls which all seem to do exactly the right thing. ie they've reduced a lot of complexity to a small set of intuitive controls.

@leadsquiteman, interesting that you should mention the bass, I actually reduced it in the final mix because it was booming on my monitors, but a couple of other people told me it sounded fine on their systems, obviously I should have paid more attention to them.

[tan111]

I've decided to read th ecomments firts an dthen see if I would agree or not, and you know, I really enjoyed that! nice job!

[crumhorn]

^^^ thanks

Also thanks @everybody who's taken time to download and listen, I totally understand if you don't feel like commenting, I appreciate the fact that you took time to listen.

Edit:

I've just discovered another good incentive to post you music on this forum. If you google for "Blokes With Guitars" this page comes up second from the top!

[Tupe67]

Great stuff... This inspires me to lay down some guitar tracks

[leedsquietman]

I would LOVE a Taylor guitar - I'm using a Yamaha Pacifica 412 which is a nice guitar for its price but Taylor make great product, especially their acoustics - my acoustic is a crappy 1970's low end Yamaha folk guitar donated to me several years ago and has had a few good dings in it's time.

I'm just a bass fiend, so the bass may be perfectly acceptable for 98% of the listeners Incidentally, I love my bass, a Yamaha BB4nII in nice mahogany wood stain colour and 2 soapbar pickups, that sounds great.

[crumhorn]

I would LOVE a Taylor guitar - I'm using a Yamaha Pacifica 412 which is a nice guitar for its price but Taylor make great product, especially their acoustics - my acoustic is a crappy 1970's low end Yamaha folk guitar donated to me several years ago and has had a few good dings in it's time.

I'm just a bass fiend, so the bass may be perfectly acceptable for 98% of the listeners Incidentally, I love my bass, a Yamaha BB4nII in nice mahogany wood stain colour and 2 soapbar pickups, that sounds great.

I don't think you can go far wrong with anything with Yamaha written on it to be honest.

I'd like a really nice guitar myself. One of these days I'll treat myself. I quite fancy a baby Taylor, some of them are lovely and not too expensive. My own guitar is an old Antoria copy of a Gibson jazz guitar that was given to me in a pretty bad state. But I tweaked the truss rod, fixed the wiring and replaced the pups with some Epiphone ones I got on ebay and it plays pretty well, good enough for me anyway. Both my mates who played on this track have really nice guitar collections, built up over many years. That's the trouble with being into keyboards and music technology, you spend thousands over the years and instead of a valuable collection of instruments you end up with an attic full of old junk and some synth modules worth about £50 each on ebay.

[gjm]

The guitars both went through dual channel Fishman combo

Hi crumhorn. Here is the link to the Fishman site, could you tell me which one was used on your track?

Cheers.G.

[crumhorn]

The guitars both went through dual channel Fishman combo

Hi crumhorn. Here is the link to the Fishman site, could you tell me which one was used on your track?

Cheers.G.

It was a Loudbox 100 http://www.fishman.com/products/details.asp?id=90