Spent the evening holed up in Red Hill Recording Studio with Rich McCulley banging out the guitar parts for Damn Good Day and The King of Sunset Hills. We have a nice time doing this work, but the chit chat is to a minimum when you’ve got knock out 7 guitar parts. Who said Americana music was simple?!

The King of Sunset Hills

For this tune we decided to do what we never do and that is to duplicate an electric guitar part on the acoustic. My Taylor 510. Standard Tuning. Same voicings. It’s kind of a slow and boozy number and I wanted the electric rhythm to be a little sloppy, so this guitar will actually be the foundation - even if you barely end up hearing it in the final mix. It will be back there somewhere locking things down.

Then we plugged the Gretsch Chet Atkins Nashville Model into Rich’s Vox A60 amp. I wanted this part to be a little crunchy and muddy, so we turned it up and I played while looking around the room and taking sips off a beer. All in the interest of being sloppy and casual with it all. Couple takes later we had it ironed out.

I ordered a pizza on my phone and then ventured into the next tune.

Damn Good Day

This song is a fast country stomp. Lots of picking, and we’ve intentionally put the tempo so fast that hopefully I can barely sing it. It needs to be lighthearted and that should help. Not matter what ridiculous stuff happens it is almost always a Damn Good Day.

We cut the acoustic first, capo-ing it up around the 5th fret to give it a little mandolin kind of vibe. of course, the licks that naturally fall under your hand down on the first fret can prove to be almost unplayable somewhere else on the neck, so I had to think my way through this one…eventually it worked.

Electrically there is a kick-off lick and that re-occurs several times in the tune and then Larry and I will share a duel harmony lead. But, all this was written out when the song was to be played at a slower tempo. Every time I’ve said, “YES! I think it sounds better a little faster,” I’ve not been thinking about the licks that need to be played during the solo. Last night the chickens came home to roost.

I could ask Larry to play all the parts and he could do it easily, but the song will have so much more personality if we have two players with different tones doing the different lines. So, I hack, cursed, and said, “one more time” as Rich patiently looked on. We had swapped amps and we now using my Fender Vibroverb 1965 re-issue. It has one huge 15″ speaker, and it sounds great for the country slap-back rhythm parts. For the lead stuff I plugged in the old yellow Boss SuperDrive pedal.

3 Hours, 1 Pizza, some Beer, and it was in the can. Another step closer to the finish line.