Disappear

Robert James

Six songs down for the 2023 RPM Challenge.

Jeff Beck died and I was gutted. It’s hard to lose your heroes, but it’s also odd to feel so emotional about the loss of someone you’ve never met. Life is weird, right?

I did not want to write a song that sounded like Jeff Beck because that would be idiotic. I also didn’t want to write an instrumental because when I do that they tend to be pretty awful. What I wanted was a song that used the guitar to carry the melody in places, sort of the way Beck’s best work uses the guitar to drive the melody. This is what I came up with.

There’s a brutally bad punch in at the start of the 17th bar. The vocals are bad, but the melody I came up with was worse as I forgot to allow for breathing. I ended up slicing it into four bar chunks and recording it in pieces. Now that it’s all done I am bothered by the guitar tone during the solos. I think I should have stuck with the lower gain sound I used in the rhythm tracks rather than use a fuzz box. The wah probably should go away too, but that’s not what bothers me. It’s just the gain level. I should have stayed cleaner.

The rhythm guitars, including the sections where the guitar is playing the melody are a Gibson Les Paul Standard into a Klon KTR into a Chicago Stompworks Blooze Maker into a Fender Deluxe Reverb. The leads are the same guitar and amp but the pedals are a Real McCoy Custom RMC10 wah into a Way Huge Russian Pickle.

If I never find my way back
something new to keep me here
hold the line and keep it on track
Miss me as I disappear