Lonesome SugarLand Blues
September 21st, 2008 by 
Rory Harper
I’m baaaaack!
Yeah, it’s been pretty dead in here for far too long. There have been a lot of reasons for that, and I’m delighted to see Morgan posting this past week.
One major reason for my not writing, that I haven’t mentioned before, is that I’ve been needing to spit out some poison for some time now. I’ve been planning this long, angsty post for the past couple of weeks. I started it today, then, as happens so often, I found myself saying “Hey, frak this. I wanna play with the toys!”
So I today uploaded my very firstest YouTube vid. Go Me!
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It is further evidence (as if that were needed) that the rest of Two-Headed Baby is wise to not allow me to sing with the band. It’s completely unedited, no audio or video processing whatsoever. I’m inordinately pleased with it.
I probably still need to get that angsty post out of my system. But not today.
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September 21st, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Sweet.
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:48 am
That is some nice picking. I’m so jealous of the independence of the guitar… If I just heard the music I’d never guess you were playing a solid-body. I’d be scratching my head — dobro? Six-string banjo?
How did you get that sound, anyway?
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Very cool, dude.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Thanks for the comments, guys! I had a blast doing this vid and will probably commit YouTube semi-regularly from now on.
Sean — Oh, Sean. Sean, Sean, Sean. You should know better than to ask me how I did something. I’ll tell you. In agonizing detail.
I was pretty pleased with the sound I got, too. Was old-time blues tone, but not too harsh.
I’m playing an American Standard Strat, neck pick-up, with a fresh set of Santana 9-1/2’s on it. Into a Vox DA-5 at 0.5 watts, on a tweaked Blues2 setting. Fairly heavy reverb.
I upgraded the 6-1/2″ stock speaker to an boutique 8″ Weber Alnico, which opened it up very nicely. The DA-5 is one of the most awesome sounding amps I’ve ever played through, no kidding. It’s a tiny thing, and can run on batteries. Still weighs under 10 pounds, even with the bigger speaker.
Had the DA-5 on the floor off to the side, with a Shure SM-58 mic at head height about three feet in front of me. Captured the room very well, I thought. Mic was running into a VTB-1 preamp with the gain practically dimed, which should have warmed up the signal a bit.
I think part of the old-time tone came from the amp not having a lot of bottom end captured by this setup.
I did 8 or 10 takes. The first three were probably better than this one, but I kept getting this nasty harsh static distortion for a half a dozen seconds halfway through each recording.
I finally figured out that my Blackberry was sitting next to the VTB-1, which was picking up static every time the BB talked to the network to check for new e-mail. No more static once i turned off the BB.
Frankly, next time, I’ll probably record the guitar and vocals on separate tracks, so I can pitch-correct my voice. It drives me crazy that I can’t sing in tune…
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Thank you kindly. That’s exactly the kind of information I was after.
We’ve recorded direct in and it’s pretty obvious that miking an amp gives better results — but of course that opens up a whole new world of expenses.
If you give your vocals their own track then you can have the fun of processing ‘em. Little chorus, maybe a quick delay for that Sun sound… Of course that’s just me. I like my lilies gilded.