The Murky Waters of Songwriting XXI

Hmm.

Alvin did an updated version of It's All Joon Kiat's Fault and frankly... it's weird. I dunno, he finds my old version weird.. and I had a seriously hard time keeping up with his timing on the 'updated' version.

Apart from the weird timing... it's also my dirty guitar sound. When I did my old version, I managed to create this fat, thick, creamy lead guitar tone which literally screams BLUES righty-oh in your face. You can hear this fat tone on the version which is playing on my blog.

So I re-did the dirty electric for the updated version, and Alvin mixed it in... when I heard it, I was so disappointed because:

1. The sound was thin, gritty and sounding too metal.
2. It was soft.
3. It sounded like it came from some, cheap taiwanese-made, slapped-together guitar.

So I took out the dirty guitar track, re-EQed it and stuck it on... and it came out all-right in the end (because of the added volume and bottom end), but with one glitch: it now sounded like a dirty Les Paul, instead of a creamy, Clapton-like SG... the blues edge was gone, and frankly I despised that sound... it didn't have my character coming through although it was me who played that guitar track. How do I know it sounded like a Les Paul? I played one after my test yesterday in a guitar shop, and it sounded almost exactly like it, the blank space being the lack of sustain.

I also added on a bass track which might have done some good due to the hugely different sound which hits your ears, but it only succeeds in making the dirty electric sound much more gritty.

It's almost like I'm in the shoes of Malcolm Young when he had to cut 'High Voltage' and he broke his guitar, and the only thing which was lying around was a Gibson L-5 (which is mainly used for Jazz) and he had to use it for the rhythm track for the song.

Anyway, when Alvin is free (and hopefully recovered from his bout of suspected appendicitis), I'm gonna sit down with him and re-mix the song.

However, there is an issue which I'm not too sure how to handle: should we continue to use Joon kiat's name? It might seem fun, but I think it may be overly politically-incorrect to use his name, especially since he was a pretty good teacher (to me), but his methods were undoubtedly taxing on the nerves.

Tell me your opinions.


Cheers,

Crawldaddy