This is the outro for a song I’m working on, for a project I THINK I’m done writing for. I’d been writing using DIs and amp sims and originally had planned on recording “keeper” tracks with live mic’d amps and printing everything to tape, but I have a six month old daughter so in practice a lot of my record (hoping to start next week!) will be happening while she’s asleep. So, I might just reamp the whole thing… and figured I’d better do some practicing now.
45 second clip from the outro:
This is my Strat - the chorus melody line probably had pretty old strings on at the time (demo, etc), but the little outro solo I know for a fact I had fresh strings on since I just cut that, so that’s probably more indicative of where I am now.
The thing that’s interesting about this clip to me is I planned on recording all of this through my Mesa Mark V, but I do still have the Mesa Roadster I played before buying the Mark, so I figured I should A/B the two of them and see if maybe the Roadster (a 4 Ch Recto) sounded better for trio-style arrangements, with its higher highs and lower lows, since the Mark has a ton of midrange but is relatively weaker there, at least the way I dial it. And, the answer, I think, is probably not… but when I just layered the two amps on top of each other, it actually sounded pretty cool to me. It’s interesting in that it doesn’t sound super gainy at ALL (nor should it, as a neck singlecoil, even with the gain at like 1:30 - 2 oclock on both amps), but the response is definitely more like a more saturated amp than it sounds.
There was some EQ on input (SM57 and MD421 into a BAE 1073MP followed by a Neve 551 EQ on both amps, I think with no low pass but I might have passed at 80hz on the Mark tracks, definitely not the Recto, but with a couple db boost at 700hz on them all) and I low-passed at 50 or 80 with a Sonimus Burnley73 in the mix but I think no other EQ, then a light opto-style compressor model, and a ping-pong delay.
I’m still experimenting and I’m not 100% sure this is where I’ll end up (the Mark needs fresh power tubes, arriving this week, and that might fill it out enough on its own), but I was surprised how well both amps worked together.
EDIT -nothing terribly CtC in this, there’s some faster runs at the end, but not much fast picking, most of it is legato.