Play Grunions
This is something that should have ocurred to me to do a lot earlier. It's a "test bed" for amps/guitars, a known quantity backup track that I can put stuff over and then compare results in an A-B fashion. In the past I've just recorded music and isolated clips; this is more in the way of documentation. I chose this particular tune because it seemed to give me a background for the type of guitar I built the new amp to do. Knowldegeable players will also recognize quotes from two other tunes from the same era. I will need to create some other, different tracks for different sorts of playing.
In this case I was interested in putting my newest amp through some of its paces as well as comparing it with my favorite older amp, so those are the two you can hear on this cut. I used one guitar for everything, a Warmoth Telecaster with Dimarzio Fast Track 2 pickups.
The new amp is a Marshall 18 watt lite with an extra channel added from a blonde Twin (6G8) as well as the tremolo circuit from a Matchless Hurricane. The two amps have a power section that is very similar, but the old one (my "Interociter") has a preamp which is pretty much straight tweed Bassman or JTM issue and is capable of considerably more gain than the 18 watt circuit. The few really overdriven sounds (0:49 and 4:15) on the tune are obviously coming from the Interociter, but I was surprised at how well they can cover each other's mid-ground territory. The amp with the Fender channel really does do the Fender thing better, though, and it's pretty obvious on the lower gain more Knopflery bits which one it is; there are two of these in a row, the first starting at 2:51. Everything else is played on both amps back and forth unless you hear a tremolo, and then you know which one it is for sure. There are times when I can't tell which amp it is without looking at the track listing, they can sound so similar. I didn't use any pedals and only added some reverb (and one echo bit) while recording just as I would normally. I wanted to hear the amps in a real context and if I were recording this song for real that's how I would have done it so that's how I did it here.
With a computer that's capable of doing multi track recording you can easily lay down different tracks and then compare various amps easily by muting and unmuting. You can make notes about each one in the notepads the recording/midi software uses (I'm running an old Mac with Vision DSP for my music), assuming it has that option. You can keep the whole thing on your hard drive and add other amps or guitars whenever you want; right now this song takes up about 440 megs, what with all the different experiments I've plastered onto it.
One thing this exercise brings home to me is that the player ultimately has more control over the sound of the piece than the amps do. While these amps do sound different (and I plan on using quite different speakers with them, something that will only accentuate their differences), it always sounds like me playing.
RA