Creating Down 'n' Dirty (The Song I Hate!)

Date conceived - 6th February 2022

This song took a while to get beyond its conception. It was another one I wrote with the idea that we'd do it in Storm of Crows. But let's do the title first. The "brains" of my guitar pedalboard is the Line 6 HX Stomp, which is a multi-effects processor in which you can build presets from hundreds of effects. While tweaking sounds one day, I came up with a certain tone I really loved, and I saved it with the name Down 'n' Dirty. This song was then born from a riff that I started playing while setting up this preset. I knew it would make a good song so I recorded a guide track that included the intro, verses, bridges, and choruses. I also recorded the bassline, and scratched out an idea for a lead guitar piece right at the end. Then I turned to the lyrics and that's when I hit a wall.

I knew it would be a story about a couple that would start at the end, where the guy is coming back into town to basically murder his former girlfriend, but that was about it. It started with:

Johnny's back from down the track

Dressed all in black, and yes his jack-

-et's carried underneath his shoulder

It's always "Johnny", right? You want a cool sounding name for a guy in a song, go with Johnny. He used to work on the block, Chuck Berry sang about Johnny B Goode, he was an angel, he couldn't read, he got angry, he ran away, he came home (there's a story right there!) so I knew my antagonist wouldn't end up being Johnny. How about Marvin? Marvin doesn't do any of those things. He's had a quiet life so far, so now he get's a song. Of course, given how the story goes, I probably didn't do the world of Marvins any favours.

Also, do you notice the end of the second line where I rhyme the first syllable of "jacket's" with the end of the last line? I love that trick. I know I got it from Paul McCartney but every time I try to remember which song it was my mind goes blank. Anyway, it's one of those "things" I've always wanted to do in a song so that's another one checked off on this album.

Sadly this is where inspiration got up and legged it out of the room. I couldn't even get the chorus. It was months before I was able to get anything down about the second verse and that one came so much slower than the first verse did. Of course, I roughly know the whole story, and the last verse obviously has to be a return to the end so we find out the resolution, but the first verse was the preview of that, so now I have to fit most of the story into just the second verse.

It ended up not taking months, but years. I started the music in February 2022, it was two years and eight months later I recorded the vocal. Of course, I wasn't solely working on this song all that time. I came back to it again and again, chipping away at it. I do remember that I eventually turned to my lyric ideas file to get some help with the chorus, which became:

Friday night, it's tried and true

Monday morning, for her and you

It was even later still when I realised I'd already used the "Friday night, Monday morning" lyric in Smarter Than This so I then changed this to "Friday lives" and "Monday mourning". With the lyric problem finally out of the way, I ran headfirst into the next one.

The song needed a middle 8 and after the nightmare with the lyrics, I certainly wasn't writing any more, so it was going to be a guitar solo. But when I recorded the original rhythm part, I hadn't worked out the middle 8 yet. So now I needed to find the guitar tone again so I could record a drop in, or at worst, re-record the whole rhythm track. I went back to my Down 'n' Dirty patch on the HX Stomp, played it...and it didn't sound right. I compared it to the original and it was more distorted. Each patch on the Stomp has three snapshots (you can have variations of the same patch to easily switch between) so I tried them all and one of them were right. The HX Stomp is the main part of the sound on my board but it's not the only pedal. Maybe the compressor had been on at the time. Or the EQ. Maybe I was playing the wrong pickups on the guitar. Or maybe it was a different guitar. Or maybe I'd tweaked the Down 'n' Dirty preset in the last two and a half years.

I spent weeks menu-diving and knob-twiddling with the patch and the pedalboard trying to dial the same tone back in. Out of desperation I even posted about it for help on Twitter and Reddit. I tried to match the tone using my AmpliTube plugin instead. I tried every combination of guitars, pickups, tones, switches and EQ settings I could think of. Nothing. It was gone. To this day I still can't think what I could do to emulate it. I clearly haven't thought of something, but in the long run, this is a problem that will only ever effect one person in the world. It just, I don't like to let him down.

Do you see now why I hate this song!?

I went ahead recording the rhythm part with the closest tone I could to the original. The bass had to be done as well for the middle 8 as a drop in didn't work, but that didn't bother me as much, it's a really fun line to play.

The guitar solo took a bit of time. I don't really know why but for this one song I settled on using the AmpliTube plugin again, and chose a Brian May tone (specifically the lead tone on I Want It All, apparently) which I've also mixed with his lead tone that he used live in 2019 (I have no idea how accurate that is) but I did go back and forth on a lot of different tones. The beauty of AmpliTube is you record the part dry and then you can switch between tones, so I did that a lot. But I did also record the lead part through my pedalboard, and there were a fair few versions of that too.

By the time this song was finished, I'd recorded nearly 7GB of audio in nearly three years.

(Click to expand) All the files recorded during the creationg of the song. Well, almost. There's a "Consolidated" folder too, but there's only another twenty-six files in that. Of course, not all of these files are used in the song

 Fine, I don't hate the song, but it is my least favourite track on the album, mostly because of the ordeal I went through to record it in the first place, and especially because I loved how it started out. It has such a cool groove, it should have been easy. Well I was very happy when it was finally in the can!