zielinski
solo
This is the first session I've done where I came in with little preparation (one rehearsal previously) and only rough sketches of what I wanted to do. It was also the first time I used a full looping setup in the studio. As always I had my 90's Stratocaster (at this point, still tuned to the Maxwell Horse D-A-D-G-C-F tuning) and my '67 Princeton Reverb feeding a Boogie 1 x 12. I also had a tiny battery-powered amp on a stool beside me, which works excellently for generating feedback. Pedals were a Rat, 80's Digitech 1002 2-second delay, 90's Digitech 3-second delay, and two Ernie Ball volume pedals (one for initial volume, the other for controlling the mix of the loop with the dry guitar-Rat signal) which fed into a splitter/summer box. I also had two Tascam four-track cassette recorders on a table beside me with the delay pedals. One four-track was set up as a mixer with the other four-track and delays feeding into different tracks - each also fed into one of two effects loops, which went into each of the pedals. By cranking the output of the effects loops, I was able to achieve self-oscillation - what happens when the output of an echo is fed into its input - it's a slow version of audio feedback that increases in volume and slowly overdrives the input section of the pedal, resulting in loss of fidelity and some nice noise. This is the sound heard at the beginning of the track. I played a short melody, trapped it in the 3-second delay, cranked up the output of the effects loop, and let it gestate for a minute, getting progressively noiser, before we started our actual recording. I'm happy with how this turned out, though it feels embryonic. For one thing, my playing in that tuning never developed to the same point as my playing in standard tuning, so I was limited in terms of the chord inversions that I had readily available. It was also a little daunting to have so many looping devices available - I didn't end up using the four-tracks much at all except as mixers, and I didn't integrate the delays much into the body of the song except as actual echoes, save the beginning and the very end. It's also pretty representative of my somewhat ambiguous sense of playing in tune - Julie did a lot of heavy editing on the other tracks to weed out the most obnoxious-sounding bends. I like to play with a hand always on the whammy bar, resulting in things floating around a lot, which I happen to enjoy but is a subjective matter. |
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