My new gear arrived today, including this:
I started noodling around with some new stuff, adding guitar and bass tracks to the new songs I’m working on as well as coming up with another completely new track, but in the end, it just felt right that I should introduce this guitar to the world with a little bit of one of my favorite Rush songs, part of which I can actually play on the guitar! So here it is…
[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/NaturalScience.mp3]
Comments
9 responses to “A little “Natural Science” on the new guitar”
What, no The Trees? I’m disappointed.
I’m pretty inept. But I have worked out a few other Rush bits in the past. I was actually trying to learn “La Villa Strangiato” from tablature, and I managed to stumble through about the first minute.
Sounds great! What amp did you use, or did you use a modeling device? Sounds really nice in any case. I have a POD 2.0 that works very well for home recording (not so good pumped up through a PA though, as in a live situation).
Speaking of “La Villa Strangiatoâ€?, I recently heard an amazing cover of the whole thing by Steve Morse. I can attempt to email it to you if you like, but it’s a large file. Or you could just pull it up on the net.
Gene
One other thing about La Villa…
For what it’s worth – and you may know this already – seems the easiest way to play that opening arpeggio is to place the fingers thus:
1st (index) finger: 5th string, 7th fret (E)
2nd (middle)finger: 6th string, 8th fret (C)
3rd (ring) finger: 2nd string, 8th fret (G)
4th (pinky) finger: 1st string, 8th fret (C)
The 3rd and 4th strings are played open.
This amounts to a common form of an open G major chord shifted up to the 8th fret.
From there the order of picking is pretty easy to pick out – strings 6,5,4,1..2, etc. I’m not sure whether the 3rd string gets played at all. It’s been a while since I listened to that tune.
I hope I haven’t made any errors in this, as I don’t have a guitar handy to check myself. But I think it’s correct.
G
I just recorded it in GarageBand, plugged straight into the computer. All of the effects and amp modeling are built into the software. (Actually, most of that is part of Core Audio built into Mac OS X, if I’m not mistaken.)
As for the opening arpeggio in “La Villa,” that looks like what I was playing — that was a case where I learned it from tabs, not just my own intuition (or whatever it is that occasionally compels me to burst into random Alex Lifeson riffs).
Oh, and thanks for not making note of my incorrect strumming rhythms in “Natural Science”! It’s one of those things where I just played it the way my brain sort of remembered it, without going back and listening to make sure I had it right (just like my consistently incorrect treatment of the bass part from “The Trees” in our old medley).
I didn’t notice anything amiss in your strumming of Natural Science. Sounded fine to me. But then you know as well as anyone that I’m not a purist with that sort of thing. Our medley is a good example. I’m happy that you put your own “stamp” on the bass parts.
That’s really cool about GarageBand. I’m ashamed to say that I have that program on my Mac but have barely even looked at it. I had no idea it could do that much. I assume you have to have some kind of interface to plug instruments in. I’m vaguely aware of “drum loops” that (as I understand it) can be dropped into programs like GarageBand. Seems like that would make for a finished sound that would be a whole lot better than what you would get with a drum machine.
So much to learn and so little time. My head is still hurting from learning just enough to be competent on Final Cut Pro. Now there’s a new version…ACK!
G
Apple’s marketing certainly plays up the “non-musician” elements of GarageBand with the loops and all, but the program is really a full-featured multi-track recording application. The only thing it can’t do, that I wish it could, is waveform editing (that is, actual editing of recorded instrument parts). But it’s easy enough to “get under the hood” of the GarageBand files, so if I need to edit the waveform, I just look at the “package contents” of the GarageBand file, and in there you can find individual AIFF files of the recorded parts. I open those in another program called Sound Studio to do editing, save the changes right back to the original file, and then re-open the project in GarageBand and it is automatically updated to the edited version of the file. Slick! (Well, sort of…)
But most of the time, you don’t really need to do that. If you just need to shuttle bits of the track around, slice it up, loop it, pan and fade, etc. that is all done in a non-destructive way in GarageBand.
What is really cool about GarageBand is how it ties into CoreAudio (part of OS X) for really great effects — amp modeling, reverb, and various filters, plus it has a ton of really great MIDI instrument patches built in. The drums and vintage keyboards (electric pianos, tonewheel organ, and clavinet in particular) are especially good, which is why I use them so extensively.
I did “splurge” on a basic USB MIDI controller keyboard. I got the same model Apple sells in their stores for $100, but I got a “scratch and dent” unit from American Musical Supply for only $80! It’s definitely been worth it. But even if you don’t have that, you can use the “keyboard typing” feature in GarageBand to use your computer keyboard as a musical keyboard. It’s easier than it sounds, but it does have limitations — a 1 1/2 octave range, and pretty bad lag time. It’s better than nothing though, and it’s really easy to edit the MIDI sequence visually in GarageBand after you record it.
I can go on and on singing the praises of GarageBand. It may be “consumer” software, but it does a great job. I used Pro Tools LE for 5 years, but there’s no way I’ll go back now that I’m familiar with GarageBand. It’s way easier to use, has MIDI instruments and effects built in (Pro Tools equivalents exist of course, but they’re expensive add-ons), and it doesn’t die (and require an $80 upgrade) every time there’s an incremental Mac OS X update!
Okay, probably a dumb question, but how do you get your guitar pluged in for recording? I assume there is some kind of interface supported by either USB or firewire. But what should I look for?
Gene
I have a Digidesign Mbox, which is SUPPOSED to work with GarageBand, but I’ve never gotten it to.
I actually just plug a 1/4-to-1/8 adapter onto the end of my guitar patch cord, and plug it straight into the 1/8-inch audio input jack on my MacBook.
If yours doesn’t have an audio input (which Apple didn’t, for a while), another alternative is to get a USB patch cable. I’ve seen them at Target so they’re pretty easy to come by. It looks like a regular guitar patch cord, with a 1/4 plug on one end, but the other end is a USB connector. That might actually work better than the 1/8-inch input anyway, but I haven’t sprung for one yet, because I already had the 1/4-to-1/8 adapter, and it works just fine. The one thing you want to be sure to do though is adjust the input… it defaults to stereo, so you need to change it to Channel 1 mono, and then adjust the input level accordingly as well. (Usually somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 maximum works best for me.)