Sharp Practise
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4/8/2008 9:16:55 AM
The melody palette
Well, I promised to talk about melody and the mix so here goes.
My starting point is the guitar, since it’s the basic instrument on which most of my writing is done. I’ll be looking to layer a couple or three guitar parts on most songs on the new record; some of those parts will be on the acoustic and it tends to give a better contrast of tone and playing style than too many overdubs of electric guitars.
I do like, however, to get the grittier guitar parts down with their distortion and reverb settings already chosen. As you know, a part with distortion, or a great deal of sustain, tends to be played in a different way to guitar parts without those treatments. Adding them afterwards makes the part sound pretty weird and I like to avoid that.
Similarly, if I am adding a little distortion to a keyboard part I like to have it in there from the start; again, it does affect your playing style.
However, I’ll always hit the bypass button on reverb settings for vocals. I like to leave them untreated (although I will set up a reverb in the monitor mix, again because it’s so much better to perform the song in a more natural sounding environment) because I use reverb as one of the ways to sit a vocal in the final mix.
I’ll talk about mixing in the next instalment. Cheers for now.
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