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Here be the mp3s.

  • This is a collaboration between me (unsurprisingly) and Adrian Clark of Guitarist Magazine Music Editor fame. The clean guitar that runs throughout is me, everything else is Adrian. The solo reminds me of Francis Dunnery, which is (to me) a Very Good Thing.

    I wrote the clean guitar underpinning to this perhaps fifteen years ago, and have done a variety of things with it, never being quite ready to call it done. It's done now. Adrian rocks.

    There are more of Adrian's songs here, including a stunning gypsy-guitar cover version of my own “18 and over”.

  • This is not really a new tune, as I wrote it in the early hours of one morning around Christmas 1994, possibly very early in the new year of 1995. I was staying in my halls of residence, on a camp bed in an office as all the rooms had been cleared out for a conference. At about 2am, I woke up with SOS fully formed in my head. I wrote down the lyrics, went across to the chapel with some manuscript paper, and transcribed the piano part. Annoyingly, it came out in Ab. The guitar parts, including the solo, I worked out the next morning. The only thing that's changed is the insertion of the alternate-picked C arpeggio in the solo - in the original, it was a repeat of the little swept Am7 arpeggio used earlier. The backing vocals are also new, and everything's been freshly recorded this week.

    The gear is exactly what I usually use, so enough said about that. Following Vinny Burns's example, there are 20 to 24 tracks of backing vocals - three lines with eight tracks each in the pre-choruses, and five to six lines with four tracks each in the chorus, some climbing and others staying fairly static. Each set of four are panned two central, one each side. Because of this, I was running 38 tracks to the mix:

    • lead vocal (comped from two takes, trying to keep it raw and expressive but still in tune),
    • bass guitar
    • two rhythm guitars (doubled and panned, with different guitar sounds)
    • one solo guitar (one take - I think the third)
    • one lead guitar for the motifs at the end of the chorus
    • stereo piano
    • six tracks of drums (kick, snare, stereo toms, stereo cymbals)
    • 24 bvs.

    This has my system running at about 60% of capacity. That makes me happy.

    This is also my September Collective piece, for which the assigment was “in an 80s style”. I don't know that this is particularly 80s, but I reckon anything by me counts as 80s by default <grin>.

  • This is another Guitarist Collective piece, but (unlike the last one) it's also a “proper song”; the assignment kicked off some ideas I really liked. This August challenge was set by Bill Jehle, and the rule is simple: the guitars must not play the root note of the chord.

    The song is mostly in Em and G, and the bass guitar and string pads establish that in a quite straightforward way. Then there's a clean guitar, a very very evil Rectifier-patch guitar, and lead and two harmonies all on my favourite mk2c+ patch. Yup, five guitars, and none of them playing roots. Fun <grin>. The original scratch solo tuned out nice, so I kept it; two out of two Gitrec shred-free zones. Perhaps I'm getting mellow. Or chicken.

    Gear is the now-usual: Tanglewood bass, Ibanez JEM77FP guitar, V-Amp 2, Gold Drums, plugins. Drum programming again via an SPD6, and lots of tweaking to make up for my weak drumming skillz.

    It's called "la disparition", after the novel of Georges Perec which famously does not contain the letter E.

  • Over at the guitarist web forum, Adrian Clark started a game where we have to write and record a track under some specified rule, different every month. For this first one, the rule was "7 major chords, no other chords".

    My first thought when Adrian set us the this challenge was to write an 80s-metal-style triad riff using all seven chords within two bars. So I did; it's the second half of the verse section. It was going to be the introduction, but I decided that the simple E to G thing I have there now worked better. The riff itself goes E A B E G D F C. The next section is an F, C, G vamp, and then there's a gratuitous E to F phrygian dominant section.

    It was going to be an instrumental, but then there was some discussion of cliched modulations at the end of rock ballads... the lyrics popped out in ten minutes of concentrated piss-taking (not concentrated piss. Eww) with a rhyming dictionary. I'm particularly proud of rhyming "pasta" with "telecaster", one not to be found in the dictionary. "Spaghetti", incidentally, is Adrian's nick in #ukmg.

    I'm really glad I ended up doing a vocal tune, since nobody else did. I also decided to go for a looser guitar feel than usual, mostly because it fitted the song better but also because I don't want to get into a shredding DSW with the likes of Vibetronic. Coz I'll lose.

    Jennifer: guitars are Ibanez JEM77FP through V-Amp 2. Rhythm on JCM800, lead on Mk2C+. Bass is a Tanglewood Warrior through the V-Amp on "tube preamp". Vocals are a Shure Beta 57 through a Joe Meek VC3Q. Effects and mixing by Cubase. Mineral water by Volvic.

    It's called "18 and over" because there are no minors allowed.

  • Widdlefest time again. This time, I'm hosting the entries. Phear me. I transcribed it again, too, in case you're in need of a triplet picking lick to work on.

    This time John R gets a rest, and the mixing is going to be done by Vinny Burns, just as soon as his new CD is finished.

    Rumours that Vinny is dragging his feet with his CD to avoid having to pull together the best part of fifty chunks of guitar indulgence into a half-hour abomination are false. But very plausible.

  • The first song I did with my new recording gear. Best thought of as a polished demo; the drums certainly need some work. Written sometime in the spring of 2000, eventually recorded in the summer of 2001. Credit list is simple; Everything: me. Copyright: me, 2000, 2001.

    For any gear freaks out there, the rhythm parts used my Boss GL100 preamp; the solos also used my rackmount Chandler Tube Driver. The bass and drums are soundfonts (sampled, in other words). The guitar was all recorded direct, and played on my RG450. All the vocals and guitars ran through my Joe Meek VC3Q preamp/compressor, straight into the PC. All the time-based FX were added within the PC.

  • Not a song as such, but a little bit of self-indulgence, and an excuse to use my shiny new recording setup. Over at uk.music.guitar we do a thing called the Widdlefest; some backing tracks are selected, and we each play a short solo over them. Then the selfless Dr John Rimmer (of the physics department of this very same university I also infest) welds them all into a single, unified, unlistenable guitarfest <grin>. My entry is here, and a choice clutch of the others can be found at Justin's place. There's a full transcription, with tablature, of my solo here.

  • Credits: written by P. M. Holdsworth and R. F. Booth, 1999; lyrics are mostly Paul's, music mostly Rick's. Vocals, lead and bass guitars, synths, drum programming, engineering - Rick. Copyright © 1999, 2001 The Snowball Project.

    Note: the sound quality here is pretty poor, I'm afraid. I hope to get better mastering with practice and the better kit I have since acquired. I'd do some things differently on the performance front if it were now, too, but if your music doesn't change over a couple of years you just aren't practising hard enough...

The frequently asked questions: what's the Snowball Project, and why is it called that? It's an umbrella term for "stuff that Paul and Rick did together", and we no longer remember why we called it that. Probably something to do with chances in hell, we think.

Contents are copyright Rick Booth, 2005, unless otherwise stated. But you knew that. All valid code.