@ Don - Excellent! Love the radio effect at the beginning. You using a cocked wah for the lead tones? Your entire stereo soundstage is off kilter to the right though.
@ Riaan - Also excellent. Very loose and mellow and has a strong melody. Liked the autowah/envelope filter on the rhythm guitar. Drums are great, but the bass doesn't have the right feel for reggae.
@Giggsy - congrats, I think you're a shoo-in for the beginners category this week! ? Your timing is very loose, but I can hear the off-beat "skanking" thing is new to you (I remember struggling with it at first), so that's alright. Maybe download some midi files to practice and play along with.
Squonk wrote:
What guitar did you use, etc etc?
Strat. Kinman Blues. All three pickups on, which has a nice balanced tone, albeit a bit more natural compression than one or two pickups - not a problem as I was compressing the heck out of the guitar anyway. Monte Allums modded CS-3 Compressor to even out the volume differences between rhythm and lead. Amp is Guitar Rig 3 - Twin into Vox speaker cab.
To be honest, I spent the vast majority of my time working on the drums (Toontrack Superior Drummer), Organ (Native Instruments B4) and bass (Edirol Super Quartet Jazz Bass through an IK Ampeg SVX plug) parts and only left myself a half hour for the guitar and 20 minutes for mixdown. :-[ That's OK though, reggae is more about rhythm section and the guitar is usually part of that.
I went for a traditional reggae drum rhythm - a slight shuffle feel and the accent all on on the three, rather than a more pop kind of reggae with four onhe floor and snare on three. I don't have a suitable snare sound (tuned high, sounding almost like a timbale), so I used a sidestick instead. Fleshed out the drums with a guiro, triangle and a woodblock.
Bass was a cow - I still don't know what makes a reggae bass part right, but I know it when I hear it. I went for a huge sound, mostly lows - almost a dub reggae bass. I have a tiny bit of an envelope filter on it to give it some life and give it an almost fretless tone.
On the bright side, I think I'm finally getting the hang of the Hammond, which is an idiosyncratic beast. I especially worked hard to balance the left and right hand sounds (lower and upper manuals respectively) because the sustained chords on the right hand tended to overpower the stabbed triads played by the left (no touch sensitivity and the two sounds had to blend without masking each other or anything else). I'm especially proud of how I got the stabs to counterpoint the guitar rhythm.
With more than four tracks, I would have done the left hand organ stabs on a clavinet and had a seperate rhythm and lead guitar.
