GRcade Musician's Club - Do You "Do" Music?

You're talking about Muse right?

Victor Mildew wrote:Been working on more music, and while I'm still gooseberry fool at producing it, I think it's starting to sound a little less amatuer hour now.

On that subject, it annoys me how completely overproduced most modern music seems to be. You have bands that are famous for a stripped down sound (as there's not many band members), then you listen to an album and it's like they've got 400 people singing and playing instruments.

I throw synths at everything to hide my less than stellar guitar playing :toot:

While I still have my Ibanez RG I also bought over the last year a Court X250 and a Jackson Flying V. I did have a Marshall amp, but sold it and replaced it with a Line 6 Spider Jam along with a x4 multi pedal with built in tuner and wah-wah/volume control.

Lockdown gave me a lot of opportunity to practice and be a better guitarist whereas before I just dabbled for the past 20 years. I've also a far better understanding of guitar maintenance and intonation. I also jam with a couple of people every now and then just for fun. In between practicing my scales/chords and learning tracks I like from various bands/musicians I even wrote a few metal, rock and punk tracks and have quite a few licks/riffs I'm playing around with. Was using Cakewalk, but found it very unstable so am currently looking at Reaper and Logic Pro.

Gear pics

The Line 6 stuff has really come on leaps and bounds over the last lot of years. I think they are owned by Yamaha now.

Squinty wrote:Gear pics

The Line 6 stuff has really come on leaps and bounds over the last lot of years. I think they are owned by Yamaha now.

A friend had exactly the same amp and I was really impressed with it. It has so many features, including quite a few drum loops and hundreds of pre-set guitar sounds from popular effects to well known musicians/bands. Want to sound like James Hetfield's guitar from the Black Album or perhaps Master of Puppets? Well you can with this.

Welcome Gemini. I swear by my POD X3, I use it exclusively for recording vocals and guitar, and for practicing (I just use good headphones If I'm playing electric, I don't use my amp at all).

Victor Mildew wrote:Welcome Gemini. I swear by my POD X3, I use it exclusively for recording vocals and guitar, and for practicing (I just use good headphones If I'm playing electric, I don't use my amp at all).

I have a Focusrite Scarlett Solo that I plug into my PC when recording. It's compatible with my amp which is good.

I had a Line 6 Pod V2 years ago. I loved the lead sound I had on that. I've never been able to replicate it.

If you want an example of the tone I'm talking about, Condition Red by Iron Savior uses that thing extensively.

I found a sound on my pod by pure accident the other week, and it was so good that I went back to several tracks and put an extra guitar part through them which made them sound so good. I was recording last night so switched through to the Mic for my accoustics and vocals, then tried to find it again. Nope, gone. I think it was actually an amp model I'd tapped in to, because I found that (angel P-ball) but it just doesnt sound the same again. It was so good I'd use it as my main guitar sound.

So what tracks/songs, if any, are you folks attempting to nail at the moment?

I've a few on the go, but the one I'm really trying to get my head around is Megadeth "Holy Wars".

I've most of the main section down, but it's the first few bars of intro where you run down the fret that's proving to be quite the challenge. Remembering
where the notes are is simple, however it's a combination of maintaining the correct rhythm and speed while running forwards and backwards in the run down that's far more difficult than I'd anticipated. I'm about 70% there so with a bit more practice I'll crack it, but damn it's surprisingly tough.

I learnt that years ago, the rhythm parts only because the solos are insane.

The Mustaine solo is just coke fuelled, high speed insanity. I've never seen anyone play it properly.

Honestly couldn't play that song if you put a gun to my head now. I remember that riff under 'brother will kill brother' being a bit of a dick. I practiced that one to a ridiculous extent.

I'm not trying to learn any songs at the moment. I really need to get the finger out. I have been learning acoustic techniques though. Like finger picking and really basic percussive slapping.

Oh absolutely balls to the solos. I'm not much of a soloist at this stage as it is, but Mustaine back then was clearly coked out of his head while fret battling with Marty who also did some insane soloing on that album.

I have an old amp modeller but since I discovered I can use the fx loop out to record direct from my ancient sound city 120w with a random speaker plugged into it as a load I've enjoyed great results from recording the insane dynamic range you get with valves (I'm not sure if that includes output valves or just the preamp, I think it's just the input). That's probably original Mullard valves. Then I can record a speaker or cab simultaneously with a dynamic mic so I can blend either clean (with post-eq valve drive as there's no master volume on this amp) or overdriven (via pedals because unless I dial it up to 6 or 7 which even with a speaker is strawberry floating loud) with the output valves (record whatever speaker or cab I have connected). The flexibility that gives me is immense. You can get good lead sounds out it amp modelling but you lose dynamic range as it always sounds a bit thin and crushed to me.

Tbh I've never really cared about learning rock songs but perhaps I should again just to give me something regular to pin down certain techniques with.

I've been fingerpicking FOR LIFE but I should probably learn to use a pick to achieve a certain amount of attack and some lead sounds.

Add me to the Holy Wars crew. I used to play that (also no solos!) followed by Hangar 18 straight through. I'm very rusty now, but I played HW so much, I reckon I'd still remember it. I used to know pretty much all of Rust in Peace, and the same for And Justice For All.

rinks wrote:Add me to the Holy Wars crew. I used to play that (also no solos!) followed by Hangar 18 straight through. I'm very rusty now, but I played HW so much, I reckon I'd still remember it. I used to know pretty much all of Rust in Peace, and the same for And Justice For All.

I don't think I could ever play Take no Prisoners, so I'm impressed by this. That song is ridiculous. And he plays it while doing vocals over it.

Squinty wrote:
rinks wrote:Add me to the Holy Wars crew. I used to play that (also no solos!) followed by Hangar 18 straight through. I'm very rusty now, but I played HW so much, I reckon I'd still remember it. I used to know pretty much all of Rust in Peace, and the same for And Justice For All.

I don't think I could ever play Take no Prisoners, so I'm impressed by this. That song is ridiculous. And he plays it while doing vocals over it.

Oh god yeah, that part at the end of the intro, where the rhythm guitar plays alone, is wild. It probably sounded awful, but I could just about keep up.

Tornado of Souls was my favourite. When I nailed the intro lick, it felt godly.

Poison Was The Cure was just beyond me, though.

I know most of Master of Puppets except for the clean break, which I just haven't gotten around to.

Also been learning some Black Sabbath classics which while not Megadeth levels of insanity are a lot of fun to jam to.

On a related side note has anyone attempted 'sweep picking'? While I can zip around the fret board I'm nowhere near fast enough to attempt such a feat, but I've watched a few vids and it's definitely a WTF moment in my head. :dread:

Just booked in a studio session for recording one of my tracks 'properly' :toot:

Victor Mildew wrote:Just booked in a studio session for recording one of my tracks 'properly'

Green Sunshine or I riot :capnscotty:

Put up whatever song you choose. We'd love to hear it.

Victor Mildew wrote:Just booked in a studio session for recording one of my tracks 'properly'

That's awesome! Do you get an engineer with it or are you doing it all yourself? I wish I'd paid more attention when I had recording sessions (many years ago!), I think all we really did was say 'up a bit, down a bit' for the various instruments and let them get on with it. There's so much to learn/know!

I've just spent a couple of weeks 'remastering' the recordings from my old band from the early '90s - we didn't have the actual multi-track tapes so I've used the first gen cassette tapes and spruced them up in Ableton using an audio exciter and some EQing - you can finally hear things that we played that have been lost over time as the tape copies got older and older.

I've also fixed missing drum hits and other mistakes, carefully patching in and blending. It's been really interesting and good to learn how a lot of the software works.

The plan is to get them up on Spotify (a bit of a vanity project, but there are enough friends/relatives that would be interested enough to justify it) so I'll let you know when it's up. It's very early '90s funk/rock/pop so a little dated these days, but great fun at the time!

Yes I am old, in case you'd forgotten!

GRcade Musician's Club - Do You "Do" Music?

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