I previously shared the result of an exercise in home recording: my lament for Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife. I have a second such exercise to share.

In this recording exercise, I wanted to try something I feel is more difficult: recording loud over-driven guitars. Getting a recorded clean guitar tone to sound okay is relatively easy. Getting a loud, fuzzy, distorted/over-driven guitar to sound good on a recording is a whole other task.

I was aiming for the buzzing guitar sounds like those on Over It by Dinosaur Jr. and Out of Routine by Idlewild. I didn’t have to get close to those – but it was helpful to have a starting direction.

I also drew on an approach to composition I recalled from an interview with Crystal Method. I couldn’t find the source, but from my fuzzy memory, when asked how they built a song, they said something like this (heavily paraphrased):

Keep adding stuff until they get bored, take stuff away until they miss it, then add it back.

The result is a minute-and-a-half of guitars I’ve called Idle Junior:

The biggest challenges continue to be the paralysis of choice. When you can dial up any guitar effect, amp, or sound you can imagine, where do you start? Setting some constraints helps. For this exercise, I wanted something at least a minute long, but not a full 3 or 4 minute song. I knew I wouldn’t have any lyrics/vocals, and I knew I wanted to try out some loud/fuzzy guitars.

Recording music is an art that I barely understand. For every minute of playing music, there must be an hour of arranging, adjusting, experiment at the computer.

A few implementation details:

• I played my old Yamaha Pacifica 102S electric guitar through the Fender Mustang Micro as an audio interface on my laptop.
• I recorded into GarageBand.
• The guitar is using Bias FX 2 amp and effects modeller – the settings I used can be found in the “ToneCloud” under the name Grunge Garden Jr. (naming things is hard).
• The quacking “wah” sound on the lead guitars is from the Wah HD effects unit in Bias FX 2 (on pretty much default settings).
• The drums are all faked auto-drummers from GarageBand. This is an obvious weak point, but they serve the purpose of getting something basic in place.
• The bass is just my guitar run through a Octaver effect to drop the pitch, and then piped into a modelled bass amp in Bias FX 2 (settings in the ToneCloud under the name First Bass Fuzz).