The Evolution of a Song
Part 4: A Taylor Made Solution
I had a couple more free hours and reeeeeeally wanted to redo that nasty vocal track. Not that I'm a great singer anyway, but neither are a lot of well known performers and it doesn't stop them. I got a comment from one person who disagreed with my Gary Puckett comparison - he said I reminded him more of Joe Walsh. Joe Walsh?! After going back and listening with that in mind, I have to say he's got a point. Anyway, I got a less painful track down in a few minutes and decided to add a harmony track on the B part of the verse while I was at it. It was still relatively early and I had the house to myself - since everything was powered up I decided to see what I could do about taking the edge off the piano chunking. First I removed the main piano bit entirely, leaving just the accent bit and putting acoustic guitar underneath. It wasn't the sound I was after, so I put back the piano, and instead brought that channel down a little in the mix and layered acoustic guitar over it, using an eighth note strumming pattern to smooth it out a little. I had to experiment a bit with EQ and chord forms on my Taylor to get the sound I wanted. I finally settled on a first fret capo and some open E position chord structures - I like the nice jangly sound that comes from strumming open high E and B strings throughout the pattern. As for EQ, in this case I only used the signal from the Taylor's pickup without any external mics. I rolled off the low and high ends and boosted the mids slightly and got what I was after.
I'm looking forward to finishing the basic structure perhaps as early as this weekend.
continue with part 5: It's Getting Better All the Time
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