Production Log: October 1, 4

Lots of stuff got done on Thursday last week and yesterday -- mostly finishing up stuff like trumpet, rhodes, and backing vocals on Little Boy and Absence.

I thought rather than just talk about what happened I'd create a record of what guitars were used for what on the songs we've recorded -- or at least on the ones that I play guitar on.

Little Boy is pretty much all done on the silver Stratocaster I played in VHS & The Babies. The evil distorted riff is done on the Flying V (aka the Nekrolog guitar) though. That riff is distorted using a 1990s ProCo Rat (yes, for those who care, it has the lm308 op amp) on the left channel and a green late 1980s (?) Sovtek Big Muff on the right. Both those pedals were christmas presents from my brother Isaac in 2006 and 2007 respectively, so props to him. All the guitar was recorded through the Super Reverb. The tremolo on the arpeggio at the end of the song is the on-board tremolo on that amp.

Geniuses is more complicated. The main guitar part (the chords during the parts that have singing) is on the yellow Les Paul Special. That's the guitar we use live. I can't remember if it was recorded through the Super or the Dr. Z, but probably the Super. The "lead" part that basically doubles the trumpet is on the Flying V; that was definitely recorded through the Super Reverb -- no pedals on either of those, though the Flying V part was recorded with the amp turned way up to get natural distortion.

As for the double-bend riff that opens the song and divides the verses from one another, I sort of had a dilemma, as the original demo I made when I wrote the song (probably in like April of 2008) had this really great guitar sound on that part which I couldn't duplicate. It was recorded with the strat through the Stang Ray, but I was running the signal through an Analogman NKT275 Sunface with my guitar's volume dialed way down. That was one kickass fuzz pedal, but unfortunately last winter I was forced to sell it for a mess of pottage. I tried to get the same effect with another pedal (the amazing but different Fulltone '69), but I still don't think it quite captures the lo-fi nastiness of the original, which I preserve below for posterity:

Geniuses demo, Spring 2008.

Sam