My old buddy and drummer Heine Lennart, wrote and asked if I could record some djent like guitar for a bicycle advert he was making.
He send me a bunch of advanced drum tracks, but my mind weren’t up for complicated stuff, so I involuntarily took a left turn, and picked two bars of one of his tracks, made a midi drum track, that was kind of similar and looped it.
Some days later, I sat down grabbed my 7 string Strandberg and started playing som heavy stuff through my 10 year old Kemper Profiler, with a 5150 profile that me and Tue Madsen from Antfarm Studios, made years ago, when he was curious enough to try out the profiler for himself.
It sounds great out of the box, so all the guitar sounds are straight out of the Kemper, with a set of presets I made for myself.
The synth like sounds are guitars with a bunch of delays on them. There are no keys on this song.
When I decided on the riff with the seven string, I went into the basement and grabbed my 1993 Music Man EVH, that I had neglected since I moved to my new hood. It had fell out the back of a trunk and a chunk of wood had broken off, just where my forearm sits on the body.
I had tried to fix it with some glue and some clear coat lacquer. But sort of gave up, because it doesn’t look good. But since then, the lacquer have hardened and although it ain’t pretty, it doesn’t feel bad any more.
So I went all in, and gave it a lot of love. Dusted it off, cleaned the frets, neck and body with steel wool and then soaked the dry as a desert neck with oil and later when it had dried up, gave it a lot of wax. Then put on new unbreakable 09 – 46 D’Addario NY XL strings and started adjusting the thing.
The neck was totally out, because I used to have 10 – 52’s on it. But the basement definitely also had an impact. But after adjustment of the truss rod and a slight adjustment of the Floyd Rose bridge, it came alive like I had never put it away.
I have a Brownish Sound preset on my Kemper and went down the rabbit hole, playing all the Van Halen songs I can somewhat play. But the sound didn’t fit this song, so I chose a legato like preset, that I made with Allan Holdsworth in mind and then the solo sound was in place.
The Music Man just sings like nothing else. The volume pot was not in a good mood, but after some massage, the crackle and pops, went away, and I could attack the song with the nicest sounding lead, I have had for a long time. Then I added some synth like guitar swells and recorded two cinema like chords, that aren’t the same, but close enough.
And lastly picked up my fretless ESP Jbas tuned the E string to B and played the djent part with a skinny pick, to get something useful out of it. It really isn’t made for this sort of music.
After a quick mix I felt pretty good about this 2.20 minute song, and then went further down the rabbit hole and found some footage from 2019, where I made documentary for Fujifilm and picked some clips, that I felt could work for a video, so I could post it here on youtube.
I hope you like it. I kind of dig it myself, which is somewhat rare. I usually don’t have much control of the songs I make. They often go in a completely different direction than expected. This one did as well, but I’m pretty pleased with the result.
Sincerely Palle Schultz
