It's Been A While.....

Had a med change and am back in action. I'm going to upload mine and then go give others some listens & comments. I really like this forum section. It's quite embarrassing that I tried to drum up this section's activity, only to get laid up out of action for a while soon afterwards. :oops: :oops:

Anyhow, this a work-in-progress. Please forgive the 2 blank measures and the 2 measure drum click track type of intro. I'll delete it when I complete the song. This also was never intended to be a note for note cover. I got curious after getting a BBE Sonic Stomp (thanks for the tip, 'slej) and decided to build a song around a tight, loud, fuzzed up marshall patch I had in my GT-10.

I'd love to hear comments and suggestions for the next version. Please keep in mind that I am not trying to go note for note or tone for tone against the Stones. Besides, I'm too poor to hire a horn section. :lol: :lol:

WARNING: THIS IS LOUD. Turn down your speakers. The click track starts at almost 4 seconds and I jump right into a wall-o-blast, which starts at 8 seconds. I'll lower my master volume for the next version. I had my system turned way down and adjusted my volume to it rather than to what it should have been. Another :oops: moment.

Without further adieu: My cover of the Rolling Stones', "Heart Breaker (Doo Doo Doo Doo doo)" from 1973's Goats head Soup album
http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=10710681

What I did and how I did it is listed below.

Guitars:
I made the distortion a lot heavier than the Stones did. I also did a lead track for the entire song, lowering the volume just for the two verses and choruses to make room for vocals. I buried the clean very deeply, but you can hear it now and then. It's stunning to me how much a quiet clean guitar thickened up the sound. I didn't do quite as much panning as the Stones did. Based on what and how I played, it sounded better this way than spread out a ton. I did do quite a bit of it, though.

I did the clean rhythm, distorted rhythm and lead guitar parts all through my Boss GT-10. The guitars were SQ Tele in bridge for the clean, Ep LP in mid position for distorted rhythm and Epi LP in bridge position for the lead. The distorted lead and rhythm was from a patch I made that included a Marshall-esque pre-amp and what they called "60's Fuzz" for my distortion. The clean guitar was on my default patch modeled after a very clean Fender Twin.

Bass and Drums:
The bass and drums was done using Band in a Box software called Real Band. I started it with a file I got from a disk I bought off of Notes Norton's website. I arranged it to twice it's size. The Fake Book that the disk was made to acompany with shows less of the song than reality does. It was a great starting point, though. I added more measures, lowered BPM and used real instrument sampling instead of MIDI. It's not exact, but it is decent and matches pretty well with what I had in mind.

Vocals:
For the vocals, I used my USB mic, a Blue Yetti. I also used some Reaper plugins. Delay and Compressor. I'm struggling a bit with my USB mic's head room, but I've since configured it better with the PC and have made it better. It's quite loud to sing and hurts like hell to do so, and I have not been up to a whole take. I personally think I used too much delay now that I've sat on this for a few days. I'd love to hear your comments.

One person has heard it and made an interesting observation, of which I agree. Only problem is, is that it wasn't what I was going for.

And remember. None of this is or was intended to be note-for-note.