It's Got Balls!!!

Hmm.

Just finished uploading the 'final' version of "To You", a song written by Alvin and myself, involving a crazy mandolin, a wacko guitar and...

an electric guitar sound with balls!

Ok, believe it or not, when you hear a sound like the electric featured on the song, many people will think it sounds like a vintage Gibson SG played through a 100-watt Marshall, but the truth is, it's just my Mockingbird, through my overdriven Marshall 15-watt, and a lot of sound mastering.

Taking a cue from my idol, Jimmy Page, who used a similar method to 'thicken' his guitar sound on 'Black Dog' (Led Zeppelin IV), I first recorded the guitar sound using my amp to blast into the mic, placed on the floor.

After recording the sound track, I then equalised it to boost the bass and treble, and leaving very little midrange.

As I had recorded the sound in stereo, I

1. transformed it into mono,
2. and then quint-tracked the sound (parallel-mixing the sound five times, by placing it in stereo on the left, in between left and middle, middle, between right and middle and right),
3. boosted the volume,
4. reduced the background noise,
5. further triple-tracked it,
6. and then noise-reduction
and then boosting of volume.
7. finally, I compressed the sound and added some reverb.

Quite a fair bit of mastering, to be truthful, but the end sound is quite wicked, although it lacks a lot of bass, but it makes up in sustain and drive.

What happened to the remaining portions of the track?

The original track was a 'live' version of the song recorded in stereo and the vocals were quite weak. So I just put the original track on the left-side, the electric sound on the right, and added another set of vocals to top off the song. The final thing I did was to add some volume and compress the sound.

What a busy day! But it was all worth it, producing a song which features an absolutely wicked electric guitar sound, and on top of that, making the term 'Hammer-Of-God' come true for this song.

So what are you waiting for? Listen to the song on www.fgg.dmusic.com and give me some feedback! I'd love to hear what you guys think of the song.

Cheers,

Crawldaddy