Tues 8th – Fri 11th
Neil is here to play guitar so that is what we do all week. There isn’t enough time to edit the takes. I’ll do that next week. In anticipation of his arrival I’ve had my Les Paul and Strat set up to his specs by my local luthier Frank Lucchesi. He tries the Les Paul and then, as the song needs slide, he tries my 335, the action being a little higher. He never puts it down all week. I wasted $90…
We record the 335 through a splitter pedal – we use my Line 6 stereo echo, turned off, to do the splitting, into a Sansamp rackmounted thing, the one I use most of the time, and my little 15 watt Matcless amp into a 12″ Matchless speaker inside a ‘silent speaker chamber’ which isn’t really silent at all. We end up using 80% amp sounds, and a little sansamp here and there. For what it’s worth, we use a Shure 57, into an API mic pre, Disressor compressor, no EQ.
We use very few pedals – two compressors, one by Way Huge and one by Carl Martin, and we use the Line 6 echo box quite a bit. The speaker chamber only breaks once, a loose wire, and we change tubes once, because we left the amp on when we ate lunch one of the days – class A amps don’t like that.
I’m writing this the week after so I’ll document the songs as I’m editing them.
I comped (that means combining the best bits from the various takes and compiling a composite , hopefully the best possible take) It’s good to be on Top and there were 11 takes to listen to. about half using slide and half played with fingers. I ended up deciding to compile the whole thing from the slide takes, which I’m sure will surprise NC, as we did the last 3 takes sans slide. The song is a very small one and the feel of his guitar brings to ming the type of thing Quine might have done (this is a feeling I get often during the week bringing to mind the Faces song – Glad and Sorry), and there is also a bit of Linsay Buckingham in the part. Can’t do much better than that, and it is still obviously NC. I am no linger hating this song. Maybe I can now finish the lyric…