The Collective

I've been working on this one for the past week and I've almost got the guitars and bass together the way I like it. At this point before I move on I want to know what parts you guys think should be changed fundamentally, what should be re-recorded, and what you like/dislike. I'm still early in the process of getting this song together and while I've already gotten a few good opinions on it from a couple of you guys I want as many as I can.

I also want to know what ideas you have for vocal work, drums, additional parts, or expansion. Also, if anything seems to not fit on a songwriting level, please let me know, now is the time before I start making other people have to learn parts to this who'd get mad if I changed it on them!

The song is at the bottom of my SC page: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=701714

Again, only a rough sketch now, but I want opinions now before I plunge ahead and start finalizing the arrangement.

I'm not a great one for advising people as to what they should do with their songs. Songs written by committee tend to end up sounding quite bland

However, having listened to your work in progress I would say there's definitely a song in there struggling to get out. You just need to pull it together into a tighter whole. How you do that is up to you. The only way we ever learn in this game is by trying different things and see how they sound

There are a lot of good ideas there but as I said, they need to be reigned in and focused

Hope that helped a little bit

I agree that you have something with potential here so keep at it. I work in an opposite way to you - I do vocal melody first then the arrangement underneath - so I think I'm next to useless in advising what to do next.

I just strum an acoustic and hum along to the chords I'm playing until something turns up

Right now... as I listen... i can pick up kind of a Linkin Park vibe

(i'm imagining the drum track and beats in a Rap style along with what you have).

What style are you shooting for?

Glad you got the technical issues sorted out that were screwing up the timing on this. Sounds much, much, much better.

Are you visualizing this with drums? I don't know about you, but when I hear grindy, buzzy, fuzzed out guitar without drums, it just doesn't sound right as a rule. That said, four decades of fuzz later, I'm not a big fan of the sound as normally practiced these days. No exception, here, really. Maybe I just spent too much time with my own Big Muff jacked all the way coming up with sounds like this and wondering why I didn't like my playing but this kind of fuzz doesn't' work for me. Sometimes less fuzz can mean more power... this much and kind of fuzz just takes all the features away from your playing... there's no dynamics, there's no edge past the first cut.

Anyhow, if I was working this song, I think I'd bring in some really powerful drums to punch up the now largely implied rhythmic power of the song and maybe tinker my distortion settings some. (Well, I certainly would tinker them; but you, legitimately, might elect not to.)

With regard to the solo, fixing up your technical issues brought the solo runs into time (where the previous version single note work had sounded really out) but there are a couple little performance glitches, time-wise, a little bit of awkwardness in a couple of places.

Anyhow, big improvement over the previous version I heard from a few days or a week or so ago. I feel confident you're moving in the right direction.

going to redo the solo section again today, I hope to get it cleaner, because it was definitely harder than something I can get up to performance level in 1 day, need some time to practice it to get the performance down. I may actually tinker with the distortion settings some b2b, but I also wanted to add some wah or other tonal pedals in to get a more varied and interesting sound.

I'll keep updating this one until it's finished. As always, the more opinions the better so keep em comin!

that's a bit heavy on the distortion...but again, I'm not a big metal fan, so if that's what you're going for, I'm not going to enjoy it as much kind of by default. Otherwise, tighten up the flow a little bit. It feels choppy...

You know an often endlessly amazing and complex source of tone and character is in the playing.

Too often, I think we can get drawn into a quest for just the right effect or fuzz pedal or the magic tone setting -- when, fundamentally, we should be looking to what we're playing and how we're playing it.

And I'm not talking as a purist here, thought it might sound like it. I love Jimi Hendrix and other guitarists who were no strangers to fuzz or even (shudder) flange/phase effects.

But, even there, there are lessons to be learned on how we use those effects and tone settings.

Give a listen to wild, crazy, lights-his-guitar-on-fire Jimi -- he might ride the feedback like a banshee at times but listen to how he uses the fuzz and phase effects he does use. They're not that heavy, as a rule.

Lots of other players in the 60's drenched themselves in the then-new phenom of distortion-in-a-box (before that, guys had to turn up or install master volumes in their amps)... but Jimi's tone is relatively warm.

But, of course, it's his passionate, dynamic playing that is so different from all the single note solo tweedly guys that came before and followed him. Listening to those guys is like listening to a guitar through a keyhole -- they've got all this distortion on, the bass is rolled out, the treble is up. It might be loud but it's little.

Jimi, OTOH, his tone is often fat and warm, he's got things set up so if he plays soft it comes out warm and undistorted but as he leans into it, maybe slips the pinky down on to the volume knob a little, things start getting complex -- not thin. It's like listening to Jimi is looking at a whole world though a guitar instead of the hole made by an icepick of distortion.

Ultimately it is, fundamentally, what the guitarist is playing and how he plays it that makes or breaks the part or solo.

hmm, I definitely see what you're getting at. I'm having my friend lay down drums tonight and then I'm going to go back and see how it sounds with that, once that's together I'll see how some EQing and such helps, if I can't get a really crisp and full sound out of everything I'll go back and try some new settings.

My question is, is it the rhythm guitar or the lead that's pulling too much distortion? or both?

Well, for me it's kinda both with maybe an emphasis on the rhythm -- but the lead has a lot, too -- but if you do put some drums under it that make kind of balance it up some. Also, even without changing the guitar part I wonder if maybe just rolling off the highs some won't give everything else a little more room -- right now you've got this pretty wide spectrum of distortion and it makes the other instruments fight to get in. Maybe if you warmed up that distorted rhythm the other less distorted guitars might have more breathing room. You might also bring up the bass a bit, perhaps. But if you have drums in there, that will certainly call for some rebalancing, anyhow, maybe it's premature to talk about that. Tinker with the EQ on the fuzz rhythm and see what you think... remember you want to leave some room in there (which will also help with transitions where the fuzz guitar comes in and out which currently sound like something of an abrupt jump).

But, you know, as I hear this more I think I can hear sort of what you might be going for, so maybe you should take my meddlesome suggestions with the proverbial grain o' salt.

[For perspective, I loved NiN's Pretty Hate Machine but was hugely disappointed by the next few albums which added abrupt wall-of-distortion guitar beds that cut in and out. I've read other people talk about what genius some of those albums are, so, you know, YMMV. ]

Well, I lied, we didn't get remotely done with the drum tracks, didn't have enough time to do anything more than discover we forgot how to mic his kit correctly lol. I actually haven't done any EQing, compressing, panning... anything to the guitars or bass yet. They're still all raw tracks, so I really ought to work with that some more, especially with this high end on the rhythm to open things up. I like that idea alot. I'll give this one some time, hopefully with the new band members I'm trying out I can get a more live feel for this and see how it all fits together nicely on monday.

Yeah... I think you'll find that if you kind of rein in the fuzzy rhythm a little at the high end it'll make more room in the mix for other instruments.

Miking drums is tricky. Sometimes the fewer mics you use the more "live" your sound will be -- but it can also mean less problems, too. It's when you start throwing a mic on every element of the kit that you get greater flexibility -- but at the cost of bigger headaches with regard to phase cancellation (as different mics pick up different drums at different trimes -- when you blend them all together, you start getting phase cancellation that can equate to missing tone (particularly bottom) in the drums. Remember, some of the most revered drum sounds of the normally-quite-dry-drummed 70s were those for Led Zepelin. Often they would use only one or two mics -- carefully placed after much experimentation. That gave an open, "live" sound but it really made people sit up a little. (Didn't hurt that Bonham was perhaps the finest hard rock drummer of his era -- and certainly remains a giant of feel and subtlety in a field where those are often lacking.)

wow, I took a break from this and came back, listened to it on my crappy earbuds to see the difference. I can definitely see what you meant about high end on the fuzz b2b, it's actually grating. It doesn't have any of the meat that it has on my monitor system. Also the bass lacks a lot of the punch that it had, but I'm sure that could go for almost anything on crappy headphones. I was wondering what speakers you tried listening to it on.

Other than "get some drums on this pronto!", I don't have much to add. But I wanted to let you know that I like what you have so far.

Neall