Blood - 2011-04-03 mix

One day in 2004 I got angry at the world and wondered if anyone, including myself, really believes in anything anymore. If you believe in anything, you have to believe in blood.

I think the lyrics were scrawled out in about 15 minutes.

I put some daggy chords behind it and tried it at practice. Craig and Keith liked the words but thought the music was pretty ordinary. Craig pulled out a strong, driving beat, Keith played a repetitive drone on bass and they encouraged me to play some different chords to the usual stuff. It is still only three chords but it rocks.

This new demo recording features a simple drum track sequenced by me and also has me on bass. I've played the bass part slightly wrong but I'm hesitant to spend more time on it - the bass track is currently a cut-and-paste of the parts I got mostly right. I simply can't play this bass part while even listening to the vocal track... and I need the vocal track as a guide because I can't count! Someone more competent than me will play it sometime soon on a much better recording. The guitar on the left is mine. It has a few mistakes but it will do for a demo. It uses (a slightly tweaked version of) one of the presets from my Behringer V-Amp and is recorded direct-in. Although it sounds OK, I don't think I'll bother much with the V-Amp in future. The vocals are my first-take and have been put through a couple of types of delay.

Abhi came over for a little while on Friday and recorded the guitar on the right and the solo. He's played the song a couple of times before, about 6 months ago. He listened, ignored the chord chart, and played all the right chords. In a couple of places where things vary a bit we had to punch in to fix some things. The solo is his 2nd take after a single practice run. The man can play guitar! :-) I chopped the end off the rhythm guitar track because I wanted it to finish before the bass and, because it cut out too suddenly, I used plug-in automation to ramp up some reverb over the last few bars - it seems to work...

Both of Abhi's guitar tracks were recorded using an ambient condenser mic pointed at my Fender Mustang I amp. The rhythm track uses a '57 Deluxe preset and the solo uses a '90s Amercian preset (with some added delay in the mix to make it move around a little bit). I really like this amp. It is small (20W) but has a decent amount of power for a small room, and the presets are awesome for someone like me who wants to just sit down and play. It also has a USB output that I haven't tried yet - this should be very nice for recording when I take the time to set it up.

This song was recorded using Ardour and I used Jamin's limiter to add oomph.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

The composition Blood is Copyright 2004 Martin Schwenke, Craig Birnie & Keith Matthews, all rights reserved.