Something Happening

Robert James

I have to apologize in advance for bars 31-37, the section right after the vocal. The whole song is playing with polyrhythms. One guitar (and the bass and drums) is playing in 4/4 time and the other guitar is playing almost the same thing in 7/8 time. I think it sounds cool.

What I didn’t consider was how that single missing eighth note in one of the guitars would sound when the phrase they are playing includes a chromatic passage. When you do the math in your head it’s obviously going to end up with the most dissonant sounding train wreck in musical history. For some reason that didn’t stop me from doing it. Pretty much anyone who listens to that passage is going to cringe like it was fingernails on a chalk board… and I LOVE it.

The other goofy thing is in the two bars or so where there is a fuzz tone guitar. As I’ve been doing for most of the year it was one guitar playing through two amps. On this occassion, since it was only a two bar phrase and nothing else was happening, I decided to reverse one amp’s worth of track. The track made up of a Shure SM-57 on a Fender Bassbreaker 15 is normal, but the track made up of a Shure SM-57 on a Vox AC15 is backwards. You’re welcome. There is some dead air on the recorded region in GarageBand so the two sounds don’t line up rhythmically, but it’s still cool in a very silly kind of way.

All of the guitars are a Gibson ES-335 Pro through the aforementioned pair of mic’d amplifiers. The two measures of fuzz tone used a Wren and Cuff Tri Pi 70 into a Klon KTR. The rest of the tracks are just the KTR.

I’d type out the lyrics, but just look at the title instead, okay? Cool. Sorry about the dissonance.