All together now
This issue Adam Goldsmith gets together with like-minds for some top-quality studio time
It’s increasingly rare that sessions happen where the whole rhythm section are in a top-quality studio together, recording original music with enough time to be creative and experimental with the material in question. I was lucky enough to experience this over the past few days, with an EP (remember those?) of music written by Rob Eckland. I’ve mostly worked for Rob in more commercial capacities, the most recent example being the ITV house band for Alan Carr, but happily he’s decided to release some tracks of his own.
We went into north London’s Livingston Studio 1 for two days to record five tracks. The lineup comprised Ralph Salmins on drums, Steve Pearce on bass, Jeff Leach on keys, Tommy Emmerton and myself on guitars, and Rob playing piano. The combined CVs of these musicians would take up several of these columns so I won’t bother attempting to list them here…
We were working to very well-produced demos that already featured the vocals. This made it easier to construct guitar parts in order to make more musical sense and complement the melody and song in general. The project had a kind of David Foster 80s/90s, pop/ gospel kind of feel, so Tommy and I got to unleash the out-of-phase, chorus-y sounds much beloved of guitar players from that era, such as David Williams, Paul Jackson Jnr and Michael Landau.
Playing with another guitar player in a studio environment is quite an art, and depends on not just the musicianship and guitar playing of all involved, but also a degree of personal chemistry, especially if it’s a ‘creative’ project rather than two people playing specifically written parts that aren’t open to much interpretation.
I’ve known Tommy for around twenty years or so but we haven’t done a gig together in quite a few years. Fortunately for both of us, we seemed to have a pretty instant musical connection, and the unspoken musical ideas flowed freely without the need for too much discussion. A big part of playing with other guitar players in the studio is being able to remove your ego, and play however much or little the song requires, and not worry about how much you’re featured.
One of my favourite quotes regarding recording guitars is from Larry Carlton – and, I may be paraphrasing a touch – but it’s that one needs to ‘think like a producer rather than a guitar player’. For example, if the other guitar player is playing a funky neck-pickup rhythm part made of mostly sixteenth notes, it might be all that is required is a repeated picky couple of notes in the out-of-phase position, every couple of bars, as a kind of answering phrase.
The guitars you use can also be complementary (or not, depending on the circumstances). For example conventional wisdom would suggest one guitar player might use a humbucker-equipped guitar, and the other single coils, but for a good percentage of this project we found ourselves both using Strat-style guitars. I found that using my Boss EQ pedal, or perhaps a mid-focused pedal such a Tube Screamer or Klon-style overdrive, can make enough of a difference that two Strats can occupy quite different sonic space on the same track comfortably, especially when combined with judicious pickup choice.
“Playing in a studio environment is quite an art, and depends on not just the musicianship, but also a degree of personal chemistry”