Figure Out

Gary Fox

Figure Out- There are about 4-5 takes of this song, all different. The song started off in the key of D, but I couldn’t hit the notes in the chorus. I then tried it in A, but it was lacking drive and energy. I tried it in G, but I couldn’t get it sounding right, since I had to use different chord voicing to do it. After listening to the three versions, I realized that I liked the key of A voicing the best, but still the key was just not doing it for me. So, I decided to restructure the song, record it in A, and then I put the recorded guitar track through a pitch shifter. Voila! (in keeping with that French thing) It had this marvelous gritty, mudslide sound that was just so vital. I did another track, also in A, put that recording through the pitch shifter so it now had this wall of f.u. guitar. I then did a third guitar track in open G that I put through an infinite reverb to give it that spacey sort of feeling behind the song. It sounds almost like a keyboard, but it is all guitar. It was during the recording of this track that I came up with the riff for Matter Of Fate, listed above. I think this one will be a good song to drive to. The lyrics are from the same source of inspiration as mentioned above. I wanted this one to be more straightforward, so at first I just doubled the vox and put it through a Neve compressor to give it depth. But, me being me, I couldn’t resist the temptation to add harmonies, so I did in verse two and the chorus. I originally had visions of ending this with a piano and me singing, but the power outage killed that plan. Maybe I will go back and add it in sometime. So, instead it ends with a vague Zeppelin feel.