Here's track two of my "Virtual CD."  They are coming to you fast and furious right now because I need to upload what I've done during the last two months before I can start telling you about the present moment.  This track is called "Just Stop Talking."  The title is inspired by certain individuals in certain corporate environments who seem to like the sound of their own voice just a bit too much!

Click here to download Track Two: Just Stop Talking

The story of this track is mainly a continuation of the story of track one.  After my success with close-miking just the snare and kick drum to get a sharper sound, I decided that I could probably stand to add one more mike on the low toms.  So I put another dynamic mike up close right between my two lowest toms, and focused on not hitting the other drums.   Again I played for a while with no concept of what I was going to do.  All I knew was that I wanted to do something relatively upbeat.  After mixing the whole drum part to stereo, I made a whole lot of loops and samples out it.   I once again added the crash cymbals on a separate track.

The main guitar riff was absolutely the first thing that came to mind when I started playing along with the drum part.  It seemed slightly surf-guitar meets late 70's Fripp to me.  Which seems like a good thing!  The bass part was pretty easy to just fit in with the guitar.

All of the various sections of this song were pretty much suggested to me by the improvised drum parts.  There's much more layering of guitar parts on this track than on track one.  This comes down to the fact that if I'm not satisfied right away I keep just trying different things.  My wife thinks that the part with the descending chromatic guitar parts sounds like Gentle Giant.  The fact that she knows what Gentle Giant sounds like is , a sign that she's spent too much time hanging around the house with me! : )

I find that I write melodies that are the most interesting when I let the melody come into my head while I'm not playing, rather than to improvise something on any instrument.  The lead guitar melody came from just singing along with the tracks I had recorded.  All of the guitar is the Guild Bluesbird played through the Roland GT-5 effects pedal. 

There's some pitch-bending lead guitar on this track which probably sounds like keyboard to most people.  I assure you, it's guitar.   It's actually the same lead guitar sound that happens earlier in the song, but I'm using the pedal on my Roland GT-5 to bend the pitch.  Why? I couldn't possibly tell you.   The drum part at this part of the track is at a completely different tempo than the rest of the track, as is the fill that leads into the beginning.  I just liked the feel of these parts, and they didn't feel as good when I electronically modified the tempo.

I did the fade out on this one, which I rarely do, because I was tired of working on the track, and I didn't want to come up with an ending!