You’d Better Wear A One-Color Tie With That Shirt!

Following yesterday’s post, today I was thinking about layering the guitar tracks on a record and this started a whole new thread on my complicated mind…

I will start with this concrete situation I faced these last weeks, a song that I play with my band since I guess, 4 years. I think I can say I know that song. I wanted to test my new recording toy and the recording application, Ableton Live. Everything worked fine until recording the chorus, on power chords.

My habit, when recording the chorus, not because I plan, but because I observed it over time, is to record one guitar as the base track and then a second one with that special something that make the chorus interesting, from the point of view of the guitar.

To my despair, what I used to play since a couple of years in live shows, didn’t sound right when recorded, especially when another guitar was added on top of it. I tried various things, deleting and recording over and over again, until, to my surprise, the best track, the one that I actually kept in the end, was the simplest one, a track where the “base guitar” played only a G and a C on power chords, straight, no muted strings, just plain power chords. On top of that, the second guitar worked like a charm…

I must admit that in live situations, I would have never agreed on playing JUST PLAIN POWER CHORDS. Man, I can not just sit and watch you playing while I play one chord every 4 measures, I CAN DO MORE THAN THIS!!

I can, but the question is…should I?

I think that we could think of a compensation law, as in everything in life, if you wear a striped shirt, you’d better wear a tie with an unique color, if one of the two life partners is a “hard rock(my mother’s saying)” the other one should be less stubborn, isn’t it? The married guys should know what I mean, guitar players or not…

It is the same with the music: if the lead vocal line is complex, you’d better think of something simpler for the instrumental part, while if the vocal part is straight, you should compensate it by having an interesting instrumental part. If both are complex will sound crowded, while if both are simple, will sound…simple and dull.

Joe Satriani said that 90% of what you play as a guitarist is rhythm guitar(I think I’ve seen this on Jack Pribek‘s site a couple of days ago) and he is damn right just that we, as guitar player, always want to play more, louder, more complicated, when we actually play for the song, not for us.

I think that the less is more law works here better than anywhere else, isn’t it?

To make my point, here’s the chorus of the song I was telling you about. Unfortunately, it is the first version, that is all I could find on this computer, drums are way too loud so almost everything stops when the kick drum comes in, but you’ll get my point. At one moment I will upload the whole song. Until then, enjoy!

By the way, that’s a Gibson Les Paul emulation there over a Strat clean tone on my Variax using tones only from Line 6 TonePort UX1.

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So, let me hear you, guys!

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