Wednesday, December 02, 2009

The new guitar

Just finished writing a song (that I started yesterday) and recording an initial version. Flubbed a couple of lines because I've only sung it through maybe three times and this is the first time with that particular version of the lyrics, oh well! But you can at least see what the new guitar sounds like.

Nice and clanky and slinky, yeah! Note that the only effects on the guitar is mild compression, I could put it through amp simulations or do other such things to it but it's "clean" right now.

Oh yeah, the song is named "Neocons", and here are its current lyrics (definitely subject to change):

Rape and kill and maim destroy
Daddy's got a brand new toy
soldiers plastic marching on
jet airplanes all dropping bombs

and nothing dies and nothing kills
it's just a game just one more thrill

grey men in undisclosed locations
pushing pins around a map
just a game to play with nations
while money piles in great big stacks

rape and kill and maim destroy
gotta use up all our toys

corpses they pile high and deep
but they never smell that reek
in bunkers hidden far below
from blood that along gutters flow

and profits pile up hipbone deep
while on the street broken men weep

so let's all praise our neocons
for profits they make selling arms
children piled in shallow graves
all rise to sing their lowly praise

rape and kill and maim destroy
it's all a game to neocons

4 comments:

  1. J. Arthur "Boodie" Ravenscroft3/12/09 4:08 AM

    Phil Ochs would have liked this song - and I mean that as a compliment. Encore!

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  2. Yeah, Phil would probably have liked it. Reading/hearing it in the light of day, my take is, "meh, needs work." But then, we're talking about something I whipped out in about two hours time between playing with my equipment and getting my guitar dialed in, so... eh.

    #9's are a *very* slinky string for a short-scale guitar. Makes it very easy to do Sonic Youthy things like I played with at the very end. I need to play with this slinky li'l babe a bit to see what kind of interesting sounds I can get out of it -- this particular song was by and large something I'd earlier pounded out on my acoustic (except without words), and was more what you'd expect thrashing an old Yamaha acoustic.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Are you using a quarter for a pick, or something? Sounds to me like you're beating the hell out of those strings.

    This was a bit of a surprise to hear. Never heard you play that aggressively before. Pretty good for a rough draft...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Using my normal pick, Jim - a piece of cut-up credit card. Recycling ;). I can change the attack by changing whether I go at it with a rounded corner or with a point, I was going at it with a point here for a sharper attack. The beating the hell out of the string thing is more a case of a) light strings (.009 high-E) on a short-scale guitar (meaning it'll have a twangier sound and respond more readily to being plucked by a pick than the same strings on a regular-scale guitar), b) action set quite low (which reduces the pressure when fretting up to G like I'm capo'ed to here, further making it respond more sharply to inputs), and c) the guitar part was originally written on my beat up old Yamaha acoustic, which needs some thrashing to make it sound anywhere near decent when playing this aggressively.

    ReplyDelete

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