Puddleglum Music

Archive for April, 2009

I recorded this demo some time ago and had it on the original site.  I won’t go into a huge amount about it, but here’s just a little bit on how it came about.

I recently (well, last year) got an Epiphone Les Paul Special Bass guitar.  Before getting the Epiphone, I would often record bass lines with my electric guitar (a 15-year-old Peavey Predator) and then pitch-shift it down 12 steps.  While this is okay, the bass lines never had all of the low-end frequencies that I wanted; even with the pitch-shift, the sound wasn’t as solid as I wanted.  Getting the Epiphone has helped a lot with that.

However, one thing that I didn’t anticipate about getting a bass would be how it would open up new song-writing avenues to me.  Traditionally (and still for the most part), I write with either my electric or acoustic guitar as the first instrument, coming up with a riff or chord progression and then filling in the rest from there.  With the bass, however, I can now write a bass line, and then fill in the guitar parts based on that.

That’s essentially how this song was written.  I came up with the opening bassline first, and then built from there.  Listening back at the demo, I’m not happy with the electric guitar that comes in at the beginning; I think it weakens the bass.  The lead guitar part is really just noodling around, and I’m still learning lead, so it has it’s own issues.

The drums were recorded in a round-about way.  I output my electric drums into a Creative X-Fi USB sound device; other methods didn’t yield a solid enough sound.  Overall I was happy with the sound of the drums, but there are definitely times when I lost the metronome, and you can hear that on the demo.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy listening to this rather rough demo!

Copyright info: Creative commons non-commercial no derivatives 3.0 license.  Thanks!

What If? by Duane Watson

 

 What If? by Duane Watson: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve been recently using last.fm, primarily through Songbird to show people what I’m listening to.  My profile is available at http://last.fm/user/starflyer3000.  A current list of my top-ten tracks is listed on the What I’m Listening To page at the top.