Discovered the secret of: Multiple guitar tracks

[davidn]

Progress in my further musical experiments slowed down recently as I slowly came to realize that I had no real idea what I was doing with channel output routing and signal chaining whatsoever. Having been unable to solve my multi-guitar problem in Cakewalk, I gave Reaper a try on ravenworks' recommendation and it makes about a billion times more sense.

Slowly - very slowly - I'm learning about post-Amiga sound production... I was correct in my feeling about having to somehow direct multiple inputs into one plugin, separate those into different channels and assign them to different outputs, but I was trying to go about it the wrong way. The people on the KVR forums for Shreddage were very helpful, and gave me the pointers that I needed to get the whole thing working - I can't quite say that it's simple now I know how to do it, especially if you look at my summary at the end of the thread, but it does at least make a certain amount of sense.

This is a rough render of a song that due to a period of insanity in 2010 is called Soul Eater - it was one of the first songs I wrote after seriously learning the guitar and has a much more varied rhythm section than I usually write. I'm still not very good at sound production and the guitars blend into each other (and the melody goes too high for Shreddage to cope at several points!), but I hope that will be somewhat fixed when I finally work out how to get my Pod X3 software working again with its three-licence-key exchange.

Comments

[kjorteo]

I think, in hindsight, it's quite fascinating to see how your didn't-quite-make it ideas turned into pieces of other ideas that did make it elsewhere--it's not quite as blatant as how Edguy wrote and recorded a rough demo version of a song called Heavenward, and then decided to completely change the lyrics and finish it up as Navigator, but it's still ... well, it looks like Soul Eater didn't quite make it, but then you turned the chorus into Red vs. Blue?

Anyway, I do see that you're making progress with figuring this whole thing out, so congratulations for that. :)

[davidn]

It's surprising looking back at how much their production changed over time - Navigator (another title I thought I might have come up with uniquely...) sounds like early Hammerfall, while the Heavenward "version" is more like something from Dio. The only other thing that I can immediately think of like that was when Last Night on Earth was written for Stratovarius just before they split up for the eighth time, and had to have its lyrics completely supplanted when it was eventually released as Timo Tolkki's short-lived solo attempt.

Soul Eater is a complete finished song, but not one that ever made it on to an album because I rebounded back to Modplug again afterwards and it's not really possible to convert it into the basic rhythm guitar that I use there - it's going to have to wait until I get comfortable enough to write songs that I consider finished in this before it gets its moment (and it's even weird to me that I'm considering a song 'finished' before I've even written a... 'real' Modplug version). I'm surprised by the comparison to Red Versus Blue because I hadn't ever thought of that, but after trying to play them side by side in my head (a difficult mental feat) the choruses really are quite similar.

If there was anything that Red Versus Blue deliberately came from, it was itself - the last vocal part at the end was originally an idea for the chorus, but it was eventually pushed out to there because as a chorus it was too slow for the rest of the song's mood.