Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Feb. 23 2008, 07:07 |
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Ok, so I guess the prodding worked 
Here's a quick and dirty demo (well...as quick and dirty as you can get when recording 14 tracks of guitars...) which is something along the lines of what Mike did there - Blunderstorm
I wanted to try and do something that would be easily repeatable by anyone, so for the guitar sound, I used the headphone output of a Marshall MS1-R micro amp, which you can buy for about £20. The red colour is particularly important, as it gives the amp a smoother tone than the black(*). I felt it would help get that nasty gnarly tone of overloading transistor circuits.
I think if I was going to do this 'for real' I'd use something else, or I'd at least add a few more things to the signal chain to get a slightly smoother sound. For some of the double speed guitars and the solo part, I did run it through a studio compressor before it hit Pro Tools, as I felt that it helped to smooth out the sound, and wanted to do that before speeding it up rather than after (in the case of the solo part, I just used it because it happened to be plugged in - I don't think compressing after recording would have been an issue). You could no doubt use a compressor pedal, or the compressor in a multieffects unit.
There's a track of bass, four tracks of guitars playing basic power chords (two with a slightly cleaner, sharper sound and two with a more fuzzy sound), a couple playing a little pattern that alternates between the root note and the same one an octave up, then there are 6 tracks of double speed guitars playing similar patterns in different registers (two pairs are doing a root-5th pattern, one pair is doing the octave pattern really high up). I stuck a solo on top of it all, played in an Oldfield-esque style, mostly because I felt like it.
The guitar was an old Gibson SG Junior that a friend of mine found lying around in the home of a strange hippy musician up a hill in Herefordshire in the early 70s. During a night of particularly wild revelry and more than few 'herbal cigarettes', my friend suggested that as the musician didn't seem to be playing the guitar much, it would be much better if he found it a new home. The musician's intoxicated nods were interpreted as a yes, and off he went with it. He never could remember the name of the guy he got it from... (**)
I EQed all the parts to take off the fizz and get closer to the tonal balance of the original recording (it was mostly just a fairly steep cut from about 6kHz upwards). I used the tone controls on the guitar and amp for some of the parts too, to get slightly mellower sounds.
One thing that's obvious to me is that Mike recorded a heck of a lot more guitars in his thunderstorm than I did here - it has a much smoother sound as a result. The 90 guitars story could well be true. He'd have needed to bounce them down a few times to achieve that, which would have smoothed out the sound a little bit as well. I also think that he used a bit more gain than the little plastic Marshall provides on its own. Actually, a nice thing to do with that amp is to run a tubescreamer into it then mic it up. Perhaps that would also yield an interesting result when using the headphone out. It's really possible to fiddle around for hours with things like this!
I also reckon Mike recorded the high notes separately rather than doing alternating patterns like I did...and probably lots more of them as well, to make them come through more strongly. I didn't actually listen to the album before I started this, as I didn't really set out to copy Mike note for note or anything - I just wanted to go for something with that kind of flavour. His harmonies were far more involved too. Goodness knows how long he spent doing all that...
Well, it's good fun to try, anyway! I imagine that spending a few days on it and really working on the sound would yield something that sounds very close to the album (by contrast, I suppose I spent about an hour doing this)...I hope this serves to prove that the technique works, though!
* Ok, so I was kidding about the red amp, the colour makes no difference at all. It is, however, about 14 years old, which I think almost makes it vintage, so it must be good.
** Yeah, you guessed it, the thing about the guitar isn't true either. Actually it's a JJ Guitars Jewel, but just saying that wouldn't have kept you entertained for nearly so long, would it? It's pretty similar to the Gibson in construction, with a mahogany body/neck, P90 pickups and a wrap-over bridge. The body is thicker than an SG, and there's some debate over how much the presence of a neck pickup alters the sound of the guitar overall, but certainly in the case of this guitar, I'd say it's all worth it for the beautifully deep sound that the neck pickup has.
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