Detection

Robert James

This one… the more I listen to this the less I like it. I was digging the chorus at first but now… did I steal this from someone? I’m starting to think it might be coming from Kings X/Dug Pinnick? Like, if Dug Pinnick was walking down the road and a small meteor fell from the sky and conked him on the head and left him all fuzzy and then he fell down a flight of stairs and landed on a guitar and wrote the first thing that came to him it would sound like this song only a few hundred thousand times better. Something like that? Anyone else picking up that vibe?

Anyway, when I write riffs I think like a computer, in powers of two. My phrases are either one bar, or two bars, or four bars, or eight bars, or 16 bars (we’re ignoring the hundreds of millions of 12-bar blues I’ve mangled over the years because the math doesn’t work out). Fortunately, the session drummers in GarageBand work in similar patterns. I almost always keep the drum sections in eight bar chunks, and the drummer function will add fills in the middle and at the end (usually). So phrases whose length is a power or two will end up with drum fills in approximately the right places.

Not this sucker. This suckers phrases are three bars, then three bars, then two bars. Using an eight bar segment for the drums put a fill at the end of the fourth bar, which is right in the middle of the second phrase which is right in the wrong place. I had to chop of the drummer segments into the appropriate lengths and then tweak the fills to fit correctly. It worked, but it ended up sounding like Keith Moon having a bad, lazy day. Oh well.

The guitars are all my Gibson Les Paul Custom. The amps are all a Vox AC15 and a Fender Bassbreaker 15 (I used them both on every take). The pedal chain for the rhythm is a Dunlop Crybaby into a Klon KTR into a Keeley Super Phat Mod. I’m really trying to find a home for that Keeley… it’s just… not quite there. The leads were the Klon into a Chicago Stompworks Blooze Maker into a Donner Yellow Fall delay. I’m really trying to find a home for that Blooze Maker… it’s just… not quite there.

Verse
give me one reason I should stay
there has to be a better way
can’t take much more of this

the truth is hard for you to take
its not a thing that you can fake
I’m really tired of this

Chorus
soul defection detection
this is my

brain infection detection
this is my