“What If?” Rough Demo
April 11th, 2009 | 
Author: 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!
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