Song 1 – That’s Alright continued
First thing we re-recorded the main acoustic. There was too much drums from the room on the live take. This is a pain, but predictable. There will be no live acoustic guitars or vocals because of this, but the plan is to replace these tracks immediately the basic track is done. After the acoustic was done I added a Nashville strung acoustic (that’s the high strings from a 12 string set only – I used this method extensively on ‘etc’) doubling the chord changes but not the strum.
Then we worked on the chorus lead guitar and we got a pretty great sound straight away by simply plugging the Les Paul into the Fender/THD set up and adding some echo. Mark played the part which is a cool amalgam of an idea of mine and one of his. We decided to have the solo use this sound also but increased the amount of echo. The solo took about 45 minutes to figure out – again it was 1/2 my ideas and 1/2 Mark’s so that’s always tricky.
I’ve been called back to record – more asap.
Back again (just did three takes of my guitar on K Street Blues (which I’m thinking of changing the title again… ‘Rhinestones’ maybe) Dave and Geoff are comping now).
Back to That’s Alright. So after we’d got the solo we continued to the end of the song without turning the echo down again. Just before we left the song Geoff and I realised, at the same time, that we’d forgotten to turn down the echo after the solo but neither of us could decide whether this was necessarily a bad thing, so we decided to go with the accident.
On to Song 2 – Westchester County Jail – which we started after lunch because I thought it was the easiest one, and then we could move on to song 3. Wrong.
Somehow Fred couldn’t get the vibe of the tempo and playing with or without click it wasn’t happening. And then still not happening. And then Fred had to take a conference call – he has a proper job, these days…
The break afforded us time to address the electric guitar sound and part which weren’t really a priority, but clearly weren’t quite right. We switched from Les Paul to Tele to my son William’s Gretsch which immediately gave us the Johnny Cash vibe we were looking for. Plus, the new Country Gentleman has a split mute system which allows one to mute either the top three or bottom three strings. Muting the top three gave us a very cool rich bass and a clipped top end. Add a slap back echo and Bob is indeed your uncle.
When Fred finally got off the phone (;)) he recalled that we’d rehearsed the song with Dave playing 8s on the tambourine (Fred’s drum part has a Bonham-esque 4’s feel) so Dave recorded some tambourine along with us and a loop was made of that and we played along to that. Bingo. But we did take hours to figure this out.
After the master was decided upon Fred overdubbed a real tambourine, and then we did my guitar. Finally I sung a guide vocal with a nice vibey slapback and then we went to the bar.