Oops
I may or may not have forgotten about this thing.
Here’s the progress: I finished all the acoustic guitar over the past few weeks and about half of the other instrumentation has been sketched out. In the next few weeks I will record all the vocals and finish the instrumentation. After that Keith will mix the whole thing and then send it off for the mastering.
The acoustic guitar work was the most fun for me up to this point. We used two acoustics for the recording: the old Fender I mentioned in some earlier posts, and my Taylor 714. The two sound very different. The Taylor is crisp and clean while the Fender is loud, buzzy and a little rough around the edges. The Taylor was recorded on a lot of the songs and seemed to record a bit better. I did a lot more pick work then I usually do when I play my songs. I use a lot of finger picking or finger strumming when I play, but that wasn’t really recording that well. The guitar parts sounded a lot better when I used a pick to play them.
I have also been experimenting a bit with some of the electric guitar sounds on the record. I recently converted an old wah-wah pedal to a volume pedal. I had this old pedal lying around my parents house that I bought sometime in my early teens when I thought it would be cool to play like Jimi Hendrix. Fortunately it didn’t see much action and has been collecting dust for the last decade. I had a thought that the pedal hardware is pretty much the same for a volume pedal, and maybe it would be a quick fix to convert it. I found some wiring diagrams online and jumped one of the capacitors in the circuit board. 5 minutes later I had a working volume pedal. The thing about a volume pedal is that you can get some pretty fantastic guitar sounds that add a lot of atmosphere. I borrowed my Dad’s hollow body electric, tuned it to open D and with a slide have been working on some sounds pretty close to a pedal steel. Playing along to some of my recorded tracks and I fell head over heels for the sound. So if I can practice my technique enough, this should be all over the record when all is said and done.
Thats all for now. I’ll try to be better about updating this thing in the coming weeks.
Wax Recording 