Stefan's 1:st Guitar Day

Since I finally finished my paper for the music psychology class I'm taking (which of course was waaay overdue), I was finally able to start recording my guitar parts. I arrived at the studio around 2 in the afternoon and immediately started to unpack my (tons of) gear. Starting with a fine old tube-amp: Music Man RD100. Unlike Mikael, I still use crappy budget-FX such as Behringer's V-amp2, but stick in there--when you hear the result on the album, you won't know the difference! ;)

My chain of FX etc. for this album finally looked like this: Ibanez RG620-7 (my 7-string guitar) --> TC Electronic integrated preamplifier --> Behringer V-amp2 --> Music Man RD100 --> 2 x Shure SM57 --> TL Augio 5001 Tube preamp --> Behringer MX8000 mixing console --> sound card --> DAW. That's it! How's that for ya, you technical mumbo-jumbo lovers?!

After having some problems with, what I thought was, too much low bass frequences in some stage of the FX-circuit, I finally realized that it was the actual guitar top (MusicMan) which was contributing to all the noise in the Marshall speaker box (erm, what the hell are those things called in English anyway?). I simply took the MusicMan off the Marshall speakers and voilà, no buzzing and humming while crunching on those big fat bassy chords!

Signal Flow

After having tuned my guitar and completed a soundcheck I started to record my first song for the day. Started out with TACTILE which seemed somewhat of a well-rehearsed song for my part. I somehow managed to get stuck on each and every part of the song (or so it seemed), trying to make every little thing perfect. While TACTILE took almost 2 hours to record, SPAWN only took half an hour. After that I recorded REMOTE VIEWS and when I was nearly through that song, Mikael showed up and inspected my work. Apparently I'd played one riff in SPAWN one half-step lower than Mikael, although that created an interesting harmony, we decided to record it the way it was written anyway.

Since I had to spend the most part of day alone in the studio today, I tended to freak out sometimes. At least while recording this video!

Three songs recorded today. A fine result if you ask me. More will follow in the days to come. See ya.