Week 31, Old and Close

As promised, here’s a nice long song with a nice little post. “Old and Close” was written in standard tuning and features the same amp and miking configurations as last week. I really like how everything ended up sounding, and the guitars in particular. You can really hear them shine at the end of the song where the drums drop out. It’s cool enough that I’m able to capture all of these great sounds with my iPhone, but it’s even cooler that I’m getting such great guitar and even bass sounds out of a practice amp. I have to give a ton of credit to the folks at Orange Amps for making such a great sounding, versatile, and surprisingly powerful little practice amp. I’ve used the Orange Crush 30r on just about every weekly song so far, as well as using it as a studio amp for some production work that I’ve done. I love that the amp has very little frills; you have bass, mid, and treble, distortion/gain, and spring reverb in a closed cab. The distortion is really smooth, and both the clean and distorted tones are some of the best that I’ve ever heard from a solid-state amp.

A good guitar sound isn’t made by amp alone. For this track I was using the ToneBone tube distortion pedal made by Radial. It’s a classic-sounding tube distortion with a wide range, adjustable voicing, and plenty of crunch when called on. The instrument of choice was my Fender Telecaster ‘72 Thinline, which really sounds great in that mildly distorted zone, as you can hear in this song. I used the same amount of drive for the entire song with both the bridge and neck pickups switched on; the only difference between the quiet beginning and the loudest parts is me fingerpicking instead of strumming. 

As I mentioned earlier, the recording configuration for this week is identical to last. Everything except drums was recorded onto the iPhone using the MultiTrack app. Vocals were recorded using my iPhone’s built in mic, and I used Reaper for the drums and the final mix.

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