Matt Stevens Remix

Hi.

Guitarist Matt Stevens recently asked if anyone fancied remixing one of his tracks and, as a big fan of his playing, I jumped at the chance. After trying a couple of ideas, this is what I came up with…

http://mattstevensguitar.blogspot.com/2010/03/sunday-free-noodle-6.html

All the guitars are from Matt’s original recording, to which I added a live bass track and a bunch of programming. So what’s going on in the track?

The intro is an 8 bar string loop, played via the wonderful Synful Orchestra plug in, and the odd chanted melody comes via the weird and wacky (and free!) Delay Lama (which has an animated interface featuring a jolly clapping tibetan monk which moves in time to the music).

The rhythm guitar is three copies of Matt’s original acoustic guitar track – one straight, one through Guitar Suite‘s fantastic Marshall JCM900 simulator (another great freebie VTS plugin), and one pitched down an octave and run through the same simulator but with less distortion and more low end.

The breakdown is then two tracks of Matt’s acoustic – one straight and one which was pitched up an octave, then run through a phaser and a high pass filter.

The “punk rhythm section” is a midi drum track played through EZDrummer and then run through Guitar Suite’s Fender Twin guitar amp simulator and EQ’d a little. The bass is my Squier Vintage Modified Jazz, played with a pick, though Amplitube’s fantastic SVX plug in which simulates an Ampeg SVT bass amp. The bass track is all one take and could possibly be tighter in places but I like the punky vibe so left it as it was. This is actually the first bass solo I’ve ever recorded with a pick!

At this point, there is also a Hammond organ courtesy of CMOrg, yet another freebie plug in ( this one was given away with Computer Music magazine a few issues ago)

The final guitar solo is comped together from Matt’s original lead parts but placed in a totally different order and run through Amplitube Live’s using the Marshall sim, autowah and two overdrive pedals to give it that mad OTT sound.

And that’s about it. Please check out Matt’s music, it’s great 🙂

Take care,
Alun

New albums available for download

Hi.

As you may know, I took part in this year’s RPM Challenge, where you have to record an album’s worth of material (10 songs or 35 minutes) of music during the month of February. I decided this year to try recording daily improvisations and see what I came up with and, by Feb 20, I had around 40 recorded. Some were on bass, some on synths, ukulele, guitar – anything I could lay my hands on really!

After much listening, I decided on 30 which I thought were releasable and these are now available in two volumes – Notebook 1 and Notebook 2.

You can listen to them free ( click on the songtitle in the player to select a different track) and then you can download them, complete with PDF liner notes) for whatever price you want, even download them for free if you want to.

If you like them, please tell people. You can click the “Share” button on the player and it will allow you to add it to your blog, website, whatever you fancy.

Take care
Alun