Unlucky Number (Acoustic)

 

What I learned from making an album

 In my announcement post, I explained why I chose to make an album this year. Since then, I've finished mixing and mastering, finalized the album title and art, and the album has been released! This isn't the first time I've made an album, but I've never done it quite like this so I wanted to take some time to write down my thoughts about what I've learned from the process, what went well, and what I'm going to do differently next time. 

Almost none of the songs on Radio Rachel were written to be on an album together. "Tele Gang" and "Interlude" are the two exceptions, but the vision for the album was to bring together my best preexisting songs and make an album out of them. Two songs were written for past albums, but the remaining eight were all written as standalone songs for my YouTube channel. They weren't written with a coherent creative vision, which seems unhelpful at first, but it actually helped develop Radio Rachel's greatest strength- variety. 

The most intimate song on the album has a very sparse texture. "Optimism: Take Two" has one guitar, bass, drumset, and one saxophone for the majority of its runtime. In contrast, "Tele Gang" boasts three lead guitar parts, two rhythm guitars, synths playing chords, bass, drums, and a full saxophone section consisting of two altos and two tenors. All of these instruments are playing at once. The range of this album, just in terms of texture, is staggering. And yet, the core instrumentation of guitars + saxophones stays pretty consistent throughout, so there's a line of continuity despite the dramatic changes in ensemble size.

Stylistically, this album is also very diverse. I've pulled from all my influences, including jazz, rock, pop, metal, hip hop, and even classical composition techniques. The fact that these songs were all written at different times in my musical journey also adds to the diversity. I know I couldn't have written "The Katocaster" five years ago, but I also haven't written anything like "Autumn" in the ten years since I wrote that song. The contrast between my 2010s and 2020s compositions only make the album stronger.

The recording process went exceptionally well for Radio Rachel. I made a spreadsheet with a row for every track and a column for every instrument, and for the most part I picked up each instrument and played through the entire album in about a day, give or take. Rhythm guitar took the longest, because there are usually multiple rhythm guitar parts for each song, somewhere between one and five but typically three or so. Woodwinds, on the other hand, took almost no time to record everything. Every song has at least one alto sax part and at least one tenor sax part, and many have a second part for each.

My process for recording each instrument was more or less the same: I pulled up the sheet music on one half of my screen, Reaper on the other half, and played the album down from start to finish. Sometimes I'd record songs out of order for variety. I started out with MIDI stems for every track in the album, and each time I recorded an instrument I found that MIDI track and deleted it. That way, I was hearing the entire arrangement while recording each part, with the parts I hadn't yet recorded being represented by the midi imitations. After each placeholder had been replaced, I was ready to mix.

My recording order was bass first, then clean rhythm guitars, distorted rhythm guitars, lead guitars, and then woodwinds. Throughout that entire process I would take breaks to work on the programmed drums and synth parts. I didn't actually play any keyboards on this album, it's all sequenced MIDI running through VSTs. But keyboards aren't the focus of this album, so I didn't think it was worth the time and effort to learn and play every keys part when I already had the MIDI ready to import directly from the score. It's not like anyone would listen to a Rachel Hoots album to hear keys, after all.

Mixing and mastering the album took quite a while, and I still feel like it wasn't completely perfect. I learned a few new tricks, and made use of pretty much every mixing technique I know. It was very difficult to get such a diverse selection of songs sounding coherent together, but I think I did an alright job. I made extensive use of busses in the mixing process- I grouped my tracks into lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums, keys, and woodwinds. Once I got all of the parts within each section relatively balanced to each other, I focused on finding the right balance between the larger sections. I still feel like I could have done a better job, but I had to finish at some point, so I called it done when I got sick of listening to it.

The mastering chain was pretty simple. I used a compressor, a saturator, and a limiter- all stock plugins in reaper. I aimed for about -9 LUFS but let's be honest, every streaming service these days normalizes the volume of every song so I'd imagine this isn't as big of a deal as it used to be. But of course, because I've got some very sparse jazz and some very dense metal both on the same album (and sometimes on the same track!) I let the LUFS vary from song to song so that hopefully the big songs would sound bigger and the soft songs would sound softer.

All in all, I'm very proud of this album project. However, there are things I would do differently. I think I could have done a better job mixing, and I think it would be nice for my next album to have a coherent creative vision from the start instead of trying to organize pre-existing songs into a tracklist. It's easy for me to think about all the things I could have done on Radio Rachel, but I need to keep reminding myself that Radio Rachel wasn't meant to show off everything I am capable of- it's just a little showcase of some of my best work, and I'm very much operating in my musical comfort zone. That's okay. Maybe next time I'll push myself a bit more. Next time, I'd like to make the fast songs faster and more technical, the slow songs slower and more expressive, and the middle tempos more rock solid. But that's for next time.

In the week since the album came out, I've been very happy with the positive reception that Radio Rachel has had. I think I met my goal of creating an album I can be proud of, and it makes me very happy to see people enjoying it.

Radio Rachel is out now!

 

My album, Radio Rachel, is now out on all the big streaming platforms! I'll have more to say soon, but for now, go check it out on your streaming service of choice!

https://rachelhoots.bandcamp.com/album/radio-rachel

Album Review: AFTERTASTE by Hey Violet

 

It's been a few years since I last did an album review, but I've been thinking about bringing them back. Today's release of AFTERTASTE by Hey Violet gives me a perfect excuse to bring this format back to my blog.

Previously, I reviewed Hey Violet's first album under that name, From the Outside. That album is one of my favorites of all time, so of course I had been waiting for a follow up album ever since. What I didn't know at the time was that it would be a seven year wait for Hey Violet's follow up album.

Hey Violet released a few EPs and plenty of singles in that time, but I am an album lover. It's not like those releases were bad or anything, but an album has some extra weight to it. There's a prestige to an album that an EP or single doesn't have. AFTERTASTE being an album puts it on a pedestal along with From the Outside and The Edge of Control in a way that those other releases won't be. Leading up to the release, I was a little bit worried that AFTERTASTE wouldn't stack up. And with this being release day as I'm writing this, I've only heard the album a couple times. My opinion could change in the years to come. But on day one, I think this is a fitting final album for Hey Violet. Yeah, I found out this would be Hey Violet's final album shortly before it came out. That sucks a bit as a big fan of the band but I'm happy we at least get one final album after all this time.

Musically, AFTERTASTE is much more mature than either of the previous two albums by the band. From the Outside was a dramatic departure from the style of The Edge of Control, but AFTERTASTE seems to bridge the earlier two albums' styles nicely. It's clearly a pop album first and foremost, but there's plenty of rock bite that was missing from From the Outside. If From the Outside was pure pop and The Edge of Control was pure rock, Aftertaste feels like a mix of both but with its own flair. Maturity is the word that comes to mind first when listening to Aftertaste, especially in contrast to the previous albums, which I would characterize as playfully immature and unapologetic of that decision. Aftertaste is an album made by adults. The song "Hazy", the album's closer, spells out the thesis of this album. Hey Violet is a successful band that made it in the music industry, but they've grown up now.

AFTERTASTE perfectly captures the feeling of early 2020s discontent. It's defiant, sarcastic, at times hopeless, and at other times rises above the hopelessness. It feels both deeply personal and also kinda universal in a way that the best pop music does. I feel like I can connect with this album today just like I connected with From the Outside all those years ago.

Hey Violet means a lot to me. I have the day I first discovered their music marked in my calendar as my Hey Violet Fanniversary - November 24, 2018, by the way. They're one of the few artists where I would preorder a new album as quickly as possible before even hearing it. Unfortunately for me, though, Hey Violet did not release AFTERTASTE on CD anywhere I could find it, so I had to settle for a digital download. That does bother me a little bit because I have the other two albums on CD, but I can't really blame them. Both CDs and Hey Violet are past their respective heydays. It still makes me a bit sad, though.

If you can relate to feeling the dread of the 2020s lately, you might enjoy this album. If you've ever been a fan of Hey Violet or their previous incarnation as Cherri Bomb, you probably owe it to yourself to hear their final word as a band. I'm not exactly expecting AFTERTASTE to be a massive hit or widespread success, but for the community of fans who love this band, it's something special and I am thankful we have it.

My favorite track from AFTERTASTE is Uncomplicated.

Why I'm making an album

 

I've been writing music since I started playing music. It's a key part of my identity as a musician that I write, record, and share music on a regular basis. For years, my creativity has been poured into my YouTube channel, and for a while I uploaded a song every week. I used to frequently have a queue of videos ready to go for months in advance. Recently, however, I've slowed down. Eventually that long queue of videos ran out, and my uploads dropped in frequency. I just haven't had the drive to write new music lately. But that doesn't mean I don't have a drive to create and a drive to make music. So, I decided it was time to distill my years of composition into an album. Here's why. 

Albums are important to me. If you've read my blog for a long time, you may remember my series of album reviews where I discussed how some of my favorite albums impacted me. Ever since I became interested in music, I have thought of albums as one of the pillars of musical expression. I love albums as a medium. I love how an album is both a collection of individual songs and a single work of long form art. Nearly every album tells some kind of story, and I love looking for that story even if it's just an indistinct feeling. Albums are an important part of music as an art form, and especially in the genres of music that I love. So it was only a matter of time before I took a crack at making an album again. 

This isn't exactly my first album rodeo. Way back in 2014, when I had only played guitar for about a year and some change, I wrote and recorded an album with some help from my friends. And in 2019, I wrote and recorded instrumentals for an album that was a collaborative project with one of those same friends. That album was never completed, but a handful of songs have seen the light of day. Those two albums were five years apart, and another five years has passed now. I guess that's just my album making cycle. 

For a while now, I've held on to the incorrect impression that if I were to create an album, I'd need to write an album's worth of new material. I found that prospect to be very intimidating, so it took until I realized it wasn't true for me to start making real progress on a 2024 album. At some point in the last month, I realized that I already had a back catalogue of songs I'd written for YouTube that would be perfect for an album. What if I just picked the best ten or so songs from my YouTube channel and recorded them the best way I knew how? That became the vision for this album. 

Almost all of the songs on the album have been heard on my YouTube channel before, but not all. Every song has been completely re-recorded, though. There are also new songs, completely new arrangements of songs, and one song so old it predates my YouTube channel entirely. This album features tracks written in 2014, 2018, 2019, and each year from 2021 to 2024. There are a couple of tracks that were made specifically for this album and have not yet appeared on YouTube, and a couple of songs so completely reimagined that they bear little resemblance to their original versions. 

I've written a lot of music that I like, but just uploading those songs to YouTube isn't really enough. I want to put the best music I've written since 2014 on an album. I want to do something bigger with these songs, and I want to have something to represent me that I can be proud of for years to come. I've already written music that I'm proud of, some of which I've been lucky enough to perform live. Now it's time to make a collection of recordings at the highest level I know how. It's an opportunity to push my limits and discover what I'm capable of. And it has also been five years. 

Right now, I'm nearly done laying down tracks. Mixing the record is about to begin, and I'm going to be extra thoughtful about this release process. I haven't settled on a name for the album yet, but I've got one that I'm probably going to use: Radio Rachel, coming July 2024. 

Techbobabble Acoustic

 

I am currently in the process of recording an album. I'm not going to say much about that right now because it's pretty early in the process and my plans might change as the work goes on. One thing I knew I wanted to do, however, was include bonus tracks. The idea of playing Techbobabble on acoustic guitar had also been floating around in my head for a while, and it felt like a perfect fit. And of course, because it's a bonus track and not part of the album proper, I felt like it would be okay to post it to YouTube.

This recording went very quickly- it took just a couple of hours. I have been playing this song as part of my guitar practice ever since my 2024 re-recording, so the lead part was under my fingers already, but I also had just recently recorded the bass and rhythm guitar parts for my album. The sax parts were easy enough to transpose over to acoustic, and the drum part worked surprisingly well too. 

For the drum loop, I recorded the kick drum by hitting the soundboard of my guitar with the palm of my hand and the snare by hitting the upper bout with my fingers- classic 2010s acoustic flair. The clap sounds in the original were changed to snaps and layered up to fill out the sound, and for the outro I added a muted strumming sound as a hi-hat. With the exception of that hi-hat part, all of the percussion was recorded as a two bar loop that repeated for the length of the song. 

Also new in this recording is the addition of an outro solo which I felt was needed to add interest to the outro. Normally, the outro features heavy use of modulation effects such as phasers or flangers to provide movement and keep the repetitive riff from feeling too static. On acoustic guitar, I didn't have that option, so I instead chose to layer another part on top. Besides, the outro changes modes from natural minor to phrygian so I had a different tonal palette to play with which kept the solo interesting. 

That's really all there is to it. Most of the parts were played pretty much exactly the same on acoustic as they would be on woodwinds or electric guitar. The bass part didn't even have to be moved up an octave or anything. I did also bump the bpm up to 210 from the original 208 just to inject a tiny bit more energy into this recording to make up for the thinner texture, but the affect is hardly noticable unless you listen to both back to back. 

As mentioned, this recording of Techbobabble is intended to be a bonus track on an upcoming album of mine, which will also feature a rendition of the song that is more true to the original but with changes informed by my recent re-recording projects. The ethos of this album is to take existing songs that I've written and polish them up to the point where they're worth publishing more widely than just on YouTube. There's a couple of brand new songs, as well. No release date or title have been decided yet. 

It's a Nice Drive on 7th Street

 

This is the second installment in the series of songs with titles inspired by my recent car troubles. After everything got fixed, I still didn't feel completely like driving home on the highway, just in case. So instead, I took a much nicer drive on a smaller road. That has absolutely nothing to do with how I wrote this song, but I thought the feeling was sort of similar.

All of the lead melody parts were played on my MIDI keyboard controlling ReaSynth running into a guitar amp simulator with just as much distortion as I could manage without ruining the peaceful mood. I tried to target chord extensions with this melody, starting phrases by emphasizing the ninth of the chord.

The song starts out with a V - vi - I - ii progression, which looks like it would be fairly stable on paper, but the way it's phrased creates a fair bit of ambiguity. Not to mention the fact that these are all being played as jazz chords, so only the root motion clearly shows the direction of the harmony. I didn't intentionally have the guitar double the bassline in the lowest note of the chords, but it sort of happened that way and created a really nice effect that I enjoy every time I listen to the verse progression.

In the chorus, I tried to emphasize the IV chord, similar to a few pop songs I've been enjoying recently. Hitting the IV right on the chorus simultaneously darkens the sound because it's a IV, but brightens it because I'm staying in the tonic key, which sort of sounds like a Lydian mode. I feel my ear being told both stories at once, which is probably why I like this harmonic move so much. Now that I've experimented with emphasizing IV a bit more, it makes me wonder what other modes could I evoke in the same way? That's a question for next week, perhaps.

There's absolutely nothing novel about my bass part, so I'll move on to talk about the bridge. Before I do, though, I guess I should try to remember to do something different with the bass next time to keep it interesting. Anyways, the bridge. It's a sudden modulation to the relative minor, forecasted in the melody only moments before it happens. I'm not normally a fuzz kinda person, but if I was going to use any distortion in this tune, I wanted it to be on the cheesier, more vintage sounding side. The riff is sort of a combination of a couple different songs I've been enjoying lately, and I doubled it on bass just to prove to myself that I could.

All of the guitar parts were played on my Fender Telecaster Deluxe, and all the guitar sounds were made using stock Reaper plugins.

Contingency

 

Sometimes things just don't go as planned. A normal day can get flipped upside down by one unexpected moment. Sometimes, though, you don't even have a plan but something cool and unexpected happens. Both of those things happened to me yesterday, but today I'm here to talk about the thing that turned out unexpectedly good: this song.

Following from my last song, I wanted to see what would happen if I recorded a song completely direct in, and reamped it after the song was written to dial in exactly the tones I wanted. The bass part went a little differently, but all of the guitars were done like that. I wasn't hearing anything but totally dry DI guitar and a metronome until after everything was recorded and I started messing with sounds on my guitar amp.

One of the benefits I discovered was the ability to change tones gradually instead of a sudden shift. For the rhythm guitar parts, I chose a low gain crunchy distortion for the verse, but turned the overdrive up for the chorus. I really liked how there was no seam between the lower and higher gain sections, just a nice dynamic contrast. For all of the parts, I also gradually faded in some delay at the very end. These are all things I could do with automation in a DAW, but doing it on a physical amplifier with my hand made me feel a lot more in control, like I was contributing to the performance after the fact.

As far as post effects go on the guitars, I kept it pretty simple. A nice reverb on the rhythm guitars, and EQ on all of them. The lead guitar is almost exactly what came out of my amplifier, but with everything under 300hz taken out completely.

The bass part was my now-standard 50% mix between clean and Reaper's default amp simulator, along with a ton of compression and a bit of EQ to pull out the extreme lows to give the kick drum breathing room. At this point I'm pretty happy with how my bass guitar sounds, so I didn't feel the need to change anything today.

After I recorded all the parts and reamped them to my satisfaction, I started work on the drums. Using a combination of MIDI finger drumming and writing the notes in with my mouse, I pieced together a part that complimented the rest of the ensemble. My biggest gripe with this song is that the drums turned out sounding a little too stiff for my taste, especially with the lax rhythmic feel of the guitars. The drums just refuse to lay back, but I still haven't found a method for humanizing drums that I really like. Perhaps an exploration for another day?

And finally, the gear list:

• Lead guitar was played on my Fender Telecaster Deluxe.
• Rhythm guitar #1 was played on my Epiphone Les Paul.
• Rhythm #2 was played on my Squier Affinity Tele.
• Bass was played on the Squier Affinity J Bass.
• The guitar amp was my Katana 50mk2.
• On the software side, Reaper handled the audio and KdenLive handled the video.

Sunrise on a Snow Day

The score for this piece is available on MuseScore. It's the follow-up to my song Trip to the Harrowing Woods, in which I wanted to see what would happen if I doubled every guitar part to make it sound like an orchestra of guitars. For that song, I think I didn't go big enough. I like that song, but I didn't quite reach my goal. So I decided to make it happen, whatever it took.

Orchestras have a lot of string players because they need to be able to play very loud using only the acoustic sound straight out of the instruments. That's not all, though. There are also some interesting things that happen to the sound waves when you have that many musicians all playing the same thing- or rather, almost the same thing. It would be impossible for every single cello player, for example, to sound 100% completely identical to every other member of the cello section. Each musician is going to play slightly ahead or behind the group, because humans aren't perfect. Every note will be at least slightly out of tune, and even if everything is played in tune and in time like a superhuman, the physical distance between each player means that even identical sounds will be slightly out of phase with each other. That means that the highs and lows of the sound waves aren't going to line up. All of these little differences add up to the rich sound of a large ensemble. It's why a choir sounds different than just a louder version of one person singing.

There are a few ways to approximate this sound as a guitarist. Chorus effects, along with reverb and delay, can make a single guitar sound bigger and fuller, but it never quite sounds like more than one guitarist, at least to my ears. While a Chorus effect on a guitar may claim to make it sound like multiple guitars, it just sounds too perfect to me. I can tell that it's one guitar, and usually that's okay. But for this project, I knew there was going to be only one way to get the sound of fifty guitarists in a room- I had to play this forty-five times, over multiple days.

Okay, let's take a step back and talk about the composition. When I recorded Trip to the Harrowing Woods, one of the biggest limitations I had was the fact that I was trying to record everything off the top of my head. That's what I do most of the time, but for this project I decided I needed to write some sheet music to make the process easier on me. Instead of having to remember things, and coming up with parts as I went along and then having to remember those too, I just wrote it all out ahead of time. It's roughly an ABA form, with the A sections in F major-ish, and the B sections in Bb Minor. I say -ish because writing in sheet music gave me the opportunity to get more creative and chromatic because I was able to look at the music from a top-down perspective instead of writing one part at a time. The modulation to the distant key of Bb Minor feels pretty smooth because I had already been using chords outside of the key of F by the time the B section rolls around.

After I had the music, I looked up how many members there were in an orchestral string section, and played each part an appropriate number of times. For example, I found that an orchestra typically has eight basses, so I recorded the bass part eight times. I did this with guitar part, matching it up with an equivalent section in a string orchestra, and playing the part that many times. That wound up being forty-five times recording a four minute song. As I'm writing this, I just finished on Wednesday night, and I started on Sunday, recording whenever I had free time. But like I just said, if I wanted it to sound like that, I had no choice but to record everything that many times.

One idea I had early on was to write the Guitar 1 part as a solo, and I stuck to that. While all of the other parts were recorded directly into the computer with no amplifier sounds, I ran Guitar 1 through an amp sim and gave it a little more in the way of audio effects to make it stand out from the rest of the group. I didn't need effects other than EQ and reverb on the rest of the guitars because the massive amount of tracks took care of it for me. I didn't want each guitar to be colored too much by effects, because that would probably add up to some nasty sounds that I don't feel like discovering right now.

This really was a mission of discovery. My choices were to put in the effort and see my idea through, or just... not do that. The choice was pretty easy, although the process sure wasn't. I think the final result was worth it, but I doubt I'll do another one of these any time soon. I have some ideas for where to go next with this genre of "guitar orchestra", but the idea of doing something more complex with this format feels a bit daunting. This wasn't even a hard piece, but playing it that many times meant I made plenty of mistakes I had to fix. But there's still a part of me that wants to write something faster and crazier. Maybe one day...

Prime Suspect

 

For a while now, I've wanted to experiment more with the USB port on my Boss Katana guitar amp. I've had the idea in the back of my mind to try to use it to reamp guitar parts, but I've never found a need to be able to do that. I have a handful of tried and true guitar sounds that I use for nearly everything, and then adjust a bit with EQ if I need to. So instead of being forced to reamp out of necessity, I decided to invent a reason to use the guitar amp this way.

The first thing I wanted to try was running synthesizers through my guitar amp using the USB port, and then recording the output. That's what I did for all of the synth parts in this track. I wrote a few notes in Reaper's MIDI editor, looped it while adjusting the guitar amp, and then recorded what I came up with. I mostly fed in simple sine waves and triangle waves and relied on the amp's built in effects and distortion to color the sound. I'm pretty happy with the results, and I could totally see myself doing this as part of a more complex arrangement to add variety to my synth lines.

Is it really better than using an amp simulator though? Maybe, maybe not. It's certainly less convenient, because I have to plug everything in and do all the routing instead of just adding a effect to the track. But the process of adjusting physical knobs to dial in the sound I want is pretty cool, and if the final product sounds this good it's probably totally worth it.

After I had all my synth parts in one track, I started editing them together into a song. I pulled some drums from LMMS, and programmed a hi-hat pattern in Reaper. This track probably didn't need a guitar solo, but I wanted to make sure I could actually get some practice doing a normal reamping. I recorded the solo directly from the guitar into my computer, and then played it through the guitar amp using the USB port. I was able to dial in my tone to fit in with the track, and I also reamped it an octave up and an octave down. While I was at it, I decided to record one of the synth parts on guitar as well.

Prime Suspect was a bit of an experiment. I wanted to know what would happen if I tried to make music in a completely different way than I usually do, and the results sound pretty nice. It's not my most complex arrangement or catchy song, but I still like it as a little jam.

Trip to the Harrowing Woods

The original working title of this song, as you can see on the VLC window in my screen capture, was Guitar Symphony. I wanted to see what would happen if I layered a bunch of identical guitar parts and panned them around, and this is the tune that I came up with.

Trip to the Harrowing Woods was written from the top down, taking my last song's method one step further. Last time, I wrote the rhythm guitar parts first so that the drums could support the song better, but because there were no drums in this song I instead wrote the melody first and chose chords, backgrounds, and countermelodies that supported the melody I already had. The song still sounds like something I wrote, but I can hear the flipped perspective.

The form is kind of an AAB thing, with an intro, a repeat, and an outro to match the intro. Between the last B section and the outro, however, is a section I'm not sure how to name. It's not a development, it's not a bridge, and it's not a breakdown, but it has some elements of all of those. Or perhaps the entire tune is one big AB form? However you want to analyze it, I suppose.

I drew from several different inspirations for this composition. Before I even started writing, I had decided that I wanted to work in E Dorian. The intro and outro evoke some of the classical guitar playing I did a few years ago, and the guitar arrangement reminds me of playing in guitar ensembles. And towards the end, when I play a 4:5 polyrhythm in the acoustics, I'm thinking about minimalist pieces I've come to enjoy.

This is my first music video in a while to not include an improvised guitar solo, but I thought it didn't really fit the mood. I've used guitar solos for a while to make longer instrumentals more interesting and avoid repetition. In this piece, the expansiveness of the arrangement gives me more opportunities for contrast. Even then, I probably could have done more.

So, did I get the results I wanted from all the doubling? Sorta. The melody was doubled four times, the chords were doubled five times, and the countermelody was doubled six times. I think I ended up with four or five harmony tracks. Apparently, however, it wasn't enough to get the big sound that I wanted. I guess if I want the sound of a hundred instruments in an orchestra, I'm going to probably have to play a hundred layers. It's safe to say that this will not be my last experiment with pushing the limits of my DAW's ability to manage tracks.

Electric guitars were split 50/50 between my Telecaster Deluxe and my Les Paul, and I pulled out the Hohner steel string along with the Squier J Bass. Actually, the jazz bass was the only non-improvised part that didn't get doubled. I had enough bass already.

The song title comes from the video I recorded to go along with the music. In the video, you're seeing me play Harrowing Woods on Disc Golf Valley, and getting my record best score on that course. 

All The Things You Are

 

Almost four years ago, I recorded All The Things You Are as a five-part Alto Saxophone harmonization of the melody. I've loved this jazz standard for a long time, and it felt like about time that I record it on guitar. As usual, I did a few things in this recording that are unusual for me. First, I used a microphone instead of capturing the direct output of either my guitar or my amplifier. I wanted to see what the amp sounded like with a mic in front of it, and I'm pretty happy with the results. Also, I didn't use a click track for this recording. I thought of it as a test of my musicianship, and I'm mostly happy with how this track turned out. It's not perfect, but it's very human.