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Slack Rock Band in a Few Easy Steps

Author: Loki Harfagr

  1. My Guitars
  2. Roland VG-8
  3. Beer
  4. Linux (in musical gear)
  5. Recording process
  6. Your Rock Band in a few easy steps

My guitars

Though for the last recordings I've used the Yamaha RGX-312, Freyja, I still have 3 other guitars that survived (mostly) thru the years I played them, on and off the road.

Sigidegun

The ancestor is an "Emperador" I bought in 1976, second hand, almost the kind depicted in "Juke Box Hero" (Foreigner).

I already had killed one jazz guitar, wounded a classical and severed a Spanish but that one was my first electric guitar.

For someone inclined to play hard that was a funny choice, it was a semi-hollow, third width case with a "Bigsby" tremolo bar and a sunburn decoration with big square mother of pearl fret inlays on the fingerboard and glossy golden and silver rotative knobs.

That was a hell of a look, maybe that's the reason why I sort of liked a small emerging band of that era named "The New York Dolls" ;-)

The look of this guitar was frantic for someone whose first band had the inspired name of "Hard Nardchic" (and that's no typo) but the sound was even hellier.

For any reader who knows a little bit about electric guitars having a hollow body and a "Bigsby" and single-coiled mikes and using a fuzz and overdrive is a real stallion to mate when it starts a Larsen feedback which, thanks to the "Bigsby" will be here to last and, thanks to the hollow body will happen any time you try to play a note and have forgotten to sit bareback on the neck.

Well, I sort of tamed the thing by adding a wha-wha pedal to my set so I could block the feedback with a whackywhoop any old time, I also used the whammy bar to this effect but the trouble with a "Bigsby" is that even when you almost happened to tune up the guitar at the start you'll never find it again as soon as you touch the tremolo bar...

I named this axe "Sigidegun", in plain English that's be something like "victorious blade" and I swear it was far from a lie, this blade probably killed thousand ears a week in glorious whinnyings!

Ah, I forgot another usual mistake I also made at the time, I used very ultra light gauged strings, something like 'Nashville 8-36' (yes, I believe this won't exist anymore :D) The only advantage that it gave to the audience was the strings frequently broke or at least went out of their path so the poor guys had a chance to listen to the bass and drums progressive method to find the beat while the keyboards was testing the jacks while soldering a spare one with chewing-gum.

Freyja

She's the one I used the most by now, I bought it about twenty years ago because I really wanted to have a 24 notes fretboard and a Floyd Rose tremolo system. I tested many of the possible ones. (I was living in Paris-Blanche at this time and that's the place to go to find electric guitars so it was easy for me to spend time testing different models.) In the end I had to choose between the two guitars that suited me the best, either a Vigier Excalibur or a Yamaha RGX 312.

For some reason the hand-crafted Vigier was much more expensive than the industrialized Japanese model so I bought the one that did cost a third of my monthly income instead of trying to steal a guitar the worth of a semester. Sometimes I see a few Excalibur in second-hand shops and I feel like buying one (or two ;-) but until now I always managed to resist!

Anyway, I then have this RGX 312, cherry red (or "raspberry"). It is light, well balanced and the fretboard is fast, it's a funny mix that this guitar has with its "Strat family" shape but a short (~620 mm) neck. The tremolo system is stable and precise, its only default was the handle has a tendency to slip off its hole, so I cured that with a small piece of plastic tape, customizing, that's what you get with industrial products :-) I also added a strip of "Velcro" to keep my guitar picks handy instead of having to use old usual tricks like having half a dozen in each cheek (which for a singing guitar player is not the easiest part, nor the healthier).

Later, I customized again by adding a "hexamike" (GK-2A) for the VG-8 control, I made the same for Sigidegun so on stage I had a spare that could be plugged in the VG-8, I also kept Hel in desperate spare, ready to plug it in any DI box in case everything went normal (that is, nothing works).

The 12 pieces of the set "A Dirty Dozen" were played on Freyja.

Hel

Years later I bought a guitar dedicated to rehearsals, it is a "Hohner-Steinberger" model, neckless and tailless, easy to carry in the subway. It though was a bit of a challenging one to play as it uses a long (like Fenders) fingerboard unlike my other guitars that all had a short (like Gibsons) one.

That's a cinch when you just play rhythmics (though you'll have to train a little bit for some position changes) but that can be a real wrist terminator when you go for speed soloing :D)

About two thirds of the guitars in "The Stars are Cruel" were played on Hel.

Anyway, I still love to play this guitar from time to time, it has a real soul of its own, only trouble is finding correct double-balled strings, and not only because they cost about thrice the price of standards but I really found a difference in global quality since 1995, don't know if that's related to the usual cause of world company beliefs in outsourcing...

I named this one 'Hel', doesn't need a translation (the last child I had, with Angroboda  ;-)

Noname guitar

I also have an 'electro' guitar, an Ibanez AE20 I do string with classical 13-56 bronze and nylon sets which gives a mellow and precise sound. This guitar, with this set of strings, is almost as hard to play as a double-bass but it's worth the effort. I'm not certain if it can be heard in pieces I put on the site, I sort of reserved its use to records and concerts with Vincent L.

I never gave a name to this guitar, though I like to use it for composing or quickly checking an idea I guess I'm really deeply electrically switched and this guitar is just a friend and not a child or a lover, I suppose the intrumentists here will know what I'm talking about but I had to know that many people think that's 9 points to Forest Lawn in your circuitry.

FX set, the Roland VG-8

I bought this FX compact set the month it arrived in my town, it was a real impulsive buy and I never regretted it :-) It uses sound modelization devices/progs to transform the capture, from the special mike, not as usual at this time in MIDI to feed a sound expander, but directly as the "matrix" of the modelized sound.

This means your way of picking, strumming, tapping, hammering, anything you do to the guitar will go into the sound, and the sound can be a lot of different things with the models built in the VG-8! The main models are for guitars and guitar amps but you'll also have flute/organ/synty/brass, note that using an organ model will not turn your guitar in an organ as the structure of the sound is deeply dependent of its matrix.

Though by learning how to pick and strum in special ways to reproduce the intonation of an instrument you can simulate a lot the real organ or brass, but if it was a question of hours to make a correct mock of the 'Child in time' organ intro I never could simulate the Toccatta in D minor !-)

Anyway, I use this FX to access different guitar and amps models, like having a Telecaster on a Tweed for the main guitar and instantly switch it to an SG on a 4 set Marshall with fuzz and overdrive (some tastes never change ;-) for the solo.

This is a very versatile pedalier and the only detail in it that made me nervous was the hexamike cable is big, heavy, rigid and fragile (and expensive), so if on stage I used a long (15m) one I always had my two rehearsal cables (5m) at hand. Now I don't play on stage anymore I'm less anxious with them but it was a bad point.

Still I have to thank the Roland people that made this piece of art of an FX combo, it is a real pleasure to use the VG-8 :-)

In case someone wants gory details on the GK-2A hexamike, here's a link to RTFM ;D)

Beer

That's certainly, besides the ego and the guitar, the vital part of the heart of a guitar player!

Mead was the only real improvement man invented, the astrophysics is a laugh and central heating is a shame, 'angsoc' was already debated in 1948 and we're left with no 'soc' and just the 'angst' remains.

Beer will help you!

Only Beer can help you!

It is improbable to ever find a guitar player that would spend eight hours drinking wine or whisky, or whatever beverage ever made on Earth and still be able to play anything, actually this poor soul will have difficulties in even telling the name of the band he was playing just a few minutes ago before he'd been fired from tour by the manager who was upset you didn't find the singer (in the backgarden with groupies and coke) nor the bass player (down the pool with crystals and not a drop to drink.)

I know that for being a beta-tester of human errors a few years, my callisthenics helped a little bit and hazard did the rest of it.

Now, as we know "Wine is fine but whiskey's quicker" and we're not in a hurry to run a big end, here's a short list of my "Beer" tastes :-)

Guinness

I know, it's not "a beer" but I really love stouts and loving stouts lead to extreme deviances like being in awe with Guinness and totally junked off with "Eku Kulminator".

Bitters

That'll be quite impossible to explain to readers that never crossed a land were brewing was a living body and not just a market share living corpse. I don't know the real reasons why there was no way to even ever hear about the name 'Bitter' in "France" though this place (Europe) has been flooded since Caesar designed the coppers to be a must when addicted to hard wine then exported vine 'savvy' :-)

Anyway, I'd recommend to "historically deprived people" to test a "Bitter" brew and send complaints to the heads of their states ;-)

Ale

I'll admit I enjoyed some ales, to my record I'd defend that I barely had occasions to test some, this directly leads to the point "yes, there are some advantages to live in Britain" ;-) Anyway, there remains in France two (different GL indexed) beers that, like "Ale" I feel like modern "Meads".

I had this feeling with a few "cervezas" in Spain but that was 1978 and I've never been around here anymore (well, I actually made a trip to "Catalan Country" but it's now so sad to see them warp off to a clinical world of "give the goof a Hein.*".

Lager

There are a few possible lagers around, sigh... Tribute to the worst, Hein.* leads the world of lagers, you won't see me drinking any, actually in case you believe I am about to pick one and eventually drink some of it please give me some sugar or call out for the firemen to help me ;D)

Linux (in musical gear)

Bad score on this topic. I use 'alsaplayer' and 'mplayer' to listen to stuff but on the side of 'producing/composing/playing' I still have to make the final leap.

For 'mastering/checking' I've used 'ReZound' with LADSPA/Jackit and I really believe it's not far to be better than the Win32 equivalents in function (e.g. Steinberg's Wavelab).

Still, fact that I've not yet used Linux for recording/composing is not a commitment on the topic, as I have my time shared a lot between different functions/passions/duty my time to kill is zilch. Learning to use a software for recording is not a huge task but learning how to use it and be comfortable with it to the point it is just another instrument in the process of creation is a long walk.

For a long time I've been using Emagic's Logic Audio, I started on using their products with 'Creator' like twenty years ago, it was on Atari 68K and 68K30 machines that I used for composition (et al) even when I finally had x86 machines at home, around April Y2K, which I used only to have access to the Internet with better results than those given by the sloppy covers of browsers (the Atari line was dead since a long time then and no company was taking the risk of a bet it'd rise up again)

So I eventually (in 2002) bought the Logic 5 and spend a few weeks porting my files and samples from LA2.1 to LAW5 and some songs are now really lost because it was at that time I moved to my actual apartment and some "historical" tapes were lost or stealed in the move. Yes, shit happens, it's not a big deal for me as I still have these "lost songs" in my remaining brain cells but (bring on the horns and trombones now) they may miss to somebody :-)

I tested several supposed to be FLOSS Cubases, though I didn't like Cubase I thought that it'd be a miracle any concurrent project that heavy would start in the line of Logic Audio :-)
I was interested in Brahms but it died soon, then I tried Jazz and Rosegarden and this latter gave me a hope that it'd be a possible way in the future but it wasn't stable enough and, even more important, not easy to use without being a programmer, sincerely the interface was struggling against the user !-)

That was a few years ago and things were complicated by the fact to have to compile a specific kernel, compile the ALSA and Jackit stuff with the best possible optimizations and I even added a stochastic factor in using a laptop, especially a Vaio one, and put an external USB card.

Then you can imagine that it was an inferno each time I tried an update of any part of the software, so I sort of decided to wait it was much more mature or that I'd have much more time to kill, I already had at work a load of IT to cope with that filled all my need to play with numbers and code ;-)

I recently tested the version 1.4.0 and I think it is becoming interesting and quite usable, from a point of view of capabilities I'd say it's about what a Cubase did circa 2001-2002. Considering the difference of money and developers involved in the two projects, that's not so bad!

So, I believe I'll try and produce my next songs with Rosegarden and I'll only use Logic in case I can't achieve a specific need that's not yet available in FLOSS (like some plugin FX distributed with Logic Audio).

Recording process

I don't have a very rigid chart of tasks when I start a song. In fact some songs were written years before to finally have a second verse and a coda and some even changed of lyrics thru the years, and to be fair some lyrics changed of music as well but this was more due to the style of the musicians playing in it, including my own changes of style in playing the guitar.

For the last record, "A Dirty Dozen" it was a bit simpler, as the process was to be as close as possible of ultra-fast composition/recording, a bit like deciding to produce an album in four or six group rehersals.

I was alone, that was a disadvantage in the way I had to do every part but at least it saved me time as I didn't have to wait hours to listen to the last excuse from the drummer to be late and I didn't have to boil liters of salty coffee to wake the bass player up...

Then, I first decided the titles for the 12 pieces, I tossed a dice twice to chose which one was the first to go, decided the type of guitar and amp I wanted to play and lit up the keyboards.

I then recorded an entire bass line on a metronome, then replaced the click with drums (played on keyboards), the bass was sometimes played on the guitar but more were just played on keyboards.

Then I rehearsed the guitar by improvising freely on two to five entire plays of the piece, each time selecting in my mind what I thought sounded the best and meanwhile tried and organize which picking/strumming was the best for the general feeling of the sound of the piece (e.g., sweeping here and tapping there).

Finally I recorded this rehearsed guitar, one take, like on stage, though I admit on some I had to do the take two or three times and on one (no, I won't say which one it is !-) I made a correction to one pulled note that went oddly but the rest of the take was so great to my ears that I didn't feel like trashing it :-)

The rest was mixing and mastering, Logic Audio and ReZound, then the hard disk with the mixes and pre-masters went bozo and I did it all again...

Your Rock Band in a few easy steps

What you need :

Song is made out off these, never indulge, never think about mixing it up later, never pray on the 'mastering magic'. PLAY!

Notes for Drummers:

     pum pum tchak
     pupum   tchak
     pupupum    puputchak
     pum pum papum
     pum pum papapum
     pum pum papapum puputchakapum pum [papapum [putchack[apum]]

Notes for Singers:

     heeeeehyaaahhheee
     hiiiiihyaaahhhiii (french cover)

Notes for Bassplayers:

Whatever he says don't try to listen to the drummer, it never works. Instead, kindly help him to find the correct tempo and lead him to the understanding of the rythm, try to mask his small blurs, if he gets into big blurs stop playing at once and let's pretend it's a drum solo.

If the drum solo lasts more than the time you can drink a fresh beer, whack the insane with a twist of your doublebass head. While he tries to find his seat and sticks, have your famous bass solo.

Notes for guitar players:

Whatever they all say don't correct your pitch, it's 'your style'.

Whatever they all say don't 'tune', it's your guitar, full stop.

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