How I Created My Latest Music Upload
January 24, 2021
Recently, (January 8th) I uploaded a musical idea to Instagram as I do every week on Friday. It was an idea involving three wildly different guitar parts. There was a fingerstyle part, a sweep-picked arpeggio part, and, in the second half, a tapped lead part. All three parts were played on the neck pickup of my Stratocaster with some amount of overdrive. As such, making parts stand out from each other can be fairly difficult.
For the fingerstyle part, I used a similar Bias FX patch to what I use for imitating the tone of Yvette Young, guitarist of Covet. It’s a fairly overdriven patch using a modeler of the Vox AC30 amplifier and a delay. This patch is great because it responds very well to dynamics in playing and responds to effects like chorus very well. In addition, it handles all kinds of frequency ranges amazingly, which is helpful for Covet-style alternate tunings like the one I used for that idea.
For the arpeggio part, I used a lightly overdriven Bias FX patch with a lot of reverb and turned it down quite a bit in the mix. This made it a fairly indistinct background element while still retaining the individual notes of each arpeggio.
Finally, for the lead part, I used a very overdriven patch and mixed it fairly loud. This made it stand out as much as possible.
It’s important to make different layers stand out in a track, even in a rough idea like the ones I post to my Instagram page, and these are a few ways to do that. I hope this helps you along in your musical journey!