During a late night of noodling on the Les Paul, I came up with this simple riff with a jazzy vibe and decided to record it. I spent some time the next day adding some more guitars and bass. I intended this to be a short, simple, all clean guitars piece. Well, so much for that. I ended up adding five layers of high gain guitar tracks at the end.
There are several guitars in this track: Stewart’s on his six-string Rickenbacher and new Ibanez Artcore, plus me on my Les Paul, Mexican Tele and my metal Tele (on the bridge pick up spit to single coil).
Picked up another new guitar. I’ve always loved the Gibson ES335, but I can’t justify spending the kind of money it would take to get into a Gibson. But, I saw this Epiphone Dot Deluxe for $399. What a great guitar for the money. 57′ humbuckers, a beautiful flame maple top, and a sweet sunburst. Sold. I got it home, plugged it in and started noodling. Sure, this semi hollow body has great warm, round, jazz tones, but I cranked up the gain on my Fender ProSonic and decided to record the punky song I came up with that night. I added a second track using the Les Paul and a third using the Mexican Tele.
This track certainly needs vocals, but I’m posting it anyway.
Play or download punkass here.
Back in the 80s, I traded an Ibanez Artist for a Les Paul custom. It was a damn good trade, but I didn’t like the Les Paul. It was too heavy and the heel felt too chunky compared to the smooth heel on my Artist. So, I traded the Les Paul for a Stratocaster. I like that strat and played it a lot, but not keeping that Les Paul was a mistake. It would probably be worth nearly $3000 today.
I assumed I’d never own a Les Paul again, but stew sent me a link a few months ago for a Les Paul–from Gibson, not Epiphone–that is selling for $849. It’s a 60s Tribute Les Paul Studio. And it comes in a gold top. I wanted this thing. To make it happen, I sold a microphone on eBay for $850 to pay for this new guitar. These 60s Tribute gold tops are hard to get hold of, so I put my name in at Guitar Center to call me when they got a gold top in. I also placed online orders with Sam Ash and Musician’s Friend. When I got the call from Guitar Center that a gold top came in, I immediately drove down to pick it up.
This 60s Tribute is awesome. I love the light weight, the thin neck profile, and the satin finish. The P90 pick ups are a bit noisy, but the bark, growl and scream the way a P90 should.
So, this track is a simple piece I recorded to test the clean sounds of the new Les Paul. But, of course, I couldn’t resist a few tracks with a little gain. I’ve never had a guitar that could chunk as well as this thing.
The next in my series of instrumental pieces. The arrangement of this was loosely inspired by This Will Destroy You.
You can play or download A Fragile Friend Turns to Dust here.
This is one I recorded a while ago–it may even be posted here. But, Bryan Whitney added drum tracks using his new digital drum set up. So, here it is again
As Stewart put it, “Low meets Phillip Glass meets Beach Boys.” This is a slow one with a surprising, upbeat break.
It took me several attempts to get to a finished place on this one. The song Stewart sent me was beautiful and felt finished to me. In the end, I muted the piano, acoustic guitars and lead guitar and created a more guitar centric version of the song. Stew was looking for some pulsing ebow stuff in the verses that. I tried it and it felt a little too messy to me, but Stew loved the sample I sent him. So I finished that part by doing two tracks of ebow arpeggios and adding some delay.
Here are both versions of the song.
A short experiment using layers of the tele and an old record for the vocal track.
Another post rock instrumental piece. This one has a touch of blues in it.