Guitar Recordings of the Day

You may be wondering what I've been doing while not blogging these past few weeks. The answer, of course, is "pretty much nothing," but I have spent a decent amount of time practicing guitar. I wouldn't say I'm good yet, but I suck a lot less than I did at the beginning of the summer.

For example, I posted short samples of two songs I've been working on at SoundClick (my file manager is still screwed up).

"Untitled Song" is untitled mostly because it was assembled from bits and pieces of things I've come up with and only became a song a few hours ago. All I have is an intro and main riff, but it's sounding pretty awesome. The clean intro is just a random picking pattern that sounded good, and the extremely sweet lead guitar is a pentatonic pattern inspired by said clean guitar. Fun fact: I wrote the rhythm guitar for the main riff by recording the clean and lead, then jamming on some power chords until I found something that sounded good. I think the result works well. The whole thing sounds kind of like "Times Like These" by Foo Fighters, and it's probably the catchiest thing I've written.

Wow, that rambled. Anyway...

"Space Coyote" is a series of stuff I wrote a couple months ago and have been messing around with all summer. The title comes from the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer eats Guatemalan insanity peppers and meets his spirit guide, a talking coyote. It has nothing to do with the song, but I thought it sounded cool. There's not much more to say; Just check it out.

Also, the rhytm guitar tone in both songs is a new sound I created with the help of the Metal Shop model pack for the PODxt. It's supposed to sound like a ridiculously overdriven Marshall JCM-2000. I'm still working on it, but it's quickly becoming one of my favorite presets.

Meanwhile, in the "files that are small enough to upload the easy way" department, I recorded a quick cover of the intro and chorus from "Figure 8" by TRUSTcompany the other day, and it sounded so good that I had to share it, so check it out:

Figure 8

It's all about the Dual Rectifier. Line 6 is friggin' amazing.

Anyway, feel free to listen to and/or critique this stuff. I'm interested in feedback from fellow guitarists (Ryan and Spork, I'm looking in your direction), but anyone willing to spend five minutes (that's how long it will take you to listen to all three) on this can comment.

Later.