Creating What I Need

Date Conceived - 6th November 2001

These last two songs are very interesting. Coincidentally, they are the oldest and newest songs I have ever written (at the time). As I've said in a previous post, I thought The Future Alone was my oldest "good song", but that's because we used to play it in my band, Second Storm. I did start The Future Alone before this song, but I didn't finish it until the following year. Meanwhile, What I Need was finished on the 6th November 2001.

Even back in 2001, I generally wrote the lyrics on the left page and kept the right page free for chords or any other notes. It's very odd that I didn't do this, but who knows what went on in twenty-three-year-old Matt's head back then, if I can't remember now? No-one. That's who!

What is also impressive (in my opinion) is that I never wrote the chords for it down, which is usually the death knell for a song of mine. No chords means I won't remember it; but for What I Need, I somehow did. I think it's probably because it's a very basic riff, almost Status Quo-esque, even though I've never been a particular fan of their music. As far as I remember, I wrote this song and consigned it to the book; we never played it in Second Storm. Perhaps I thought the lyrics were not good enough.

Careening towards the end of the album, I was now casting about wildly for songs to record, and as I'm perusing my songbook, I spot that What I Need is a fully formed song and better than that, I can remember well enough how it sounded in my head. Also, possibly of fortune, I'd just bought Glenn Frey's greatest hits CD and had been playing it quite a bit in the kitchen. The Heat Is On had been living rent-free in my head for a while. I realise I can turn What I Need into an up-tempo eighties-inspired rocker.

I'm not one for alternate tunings. I've lived in standard tuning on the guitar my whole life, having only had the briefest of forays into drop D tuning to play Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen. However, D is my go-to key for a song, and with the blues rhythm guitar line, I don't think it will work high up the fretboard. I tuned my guitar to drop D and worked out how to play the shuffling rhythm on it. After three bars of playing that D chord, the progression is to F and then G. Playing a G in drop D tuning isn't too difficult. Well, what I played is actually a G5 (third fret on the high E and B strings, fifth fret on the Low E and A strings, and open in between). For the F I just shifted this shape down two frets and it sounded really good. It wasn't actually an F but it worked. Turns out it's actually an F6sus2 (if the online chord finder I found is to be believed).

Despite this being an up-tempo rock track, I recorded the rhythm parts with clean tones. I can't remember what the first guitar I used was (either the SG I built or it might be my Sire L7) but just before I finished this song I got a Sire I5L, a really odd little guitar with lipstick pickups which are great for clean tones, so I duplicated the rhythm track with this guitar and panned them hard left and right for some depth.

I also wanted to add a prominent synth part to really ram home the eighties influence, so I dug into SampleTank and programmed three different synth sounds together. I couldn't find one alone that I liked. There probably was one, it's just there are thousands, probably tens of thousands of samples in there, so I just built a sound I liked instead. On top of that I recorded my least inventive but most difficult bassline. The vast majority of the time I'm just playing the same note, but it's incredibly fast. Probably not for an actual bass player but for me it was a nightmare to get through a take without numerous mistakes. This was definitely a time for recording multiple takes and comping together the best parts. Even then the bassline isn't perfect, but when blended with everything else in the track it sounds great.

There's also, for the keen listeners out there, a simple clean guitar riff that plays throughout all the verses...except the last two lines of the last verse. I literally just noticed that as I was looking in the project file to see when it plays, I forgot to play it there! If you bought a CD, better send it back. I apparently need to update it. Oh well, that's not the first one of those I've spotted, and it doesn't exactly detract from the overall listening experience. Trust me, I've listened to every track hundreds of times to mix and master them.

Finally, the guitar solo. I found a tone I liked but very unusually, I played this solo on the neck pickup. Ask most rock guitarists and I suspect they'll tell you that they play almost everything on the bridge pickup, but for this song, the neck just sounded right. It's a warmer, less defined tone, and it suited this song perfectly.

The last thing I did was chop a big section out of the song. The guitar solo was supposed to be a full run of bridge, verse, bridge, chorus, but it was just too long. I know, how can a guitar solo be too long? But this was. I ended up cutting out sixteen bars and recording the solo again to fit, and it was perfect. The earlier version just felt like it was taking too long to get anywhere, any my lead playing isn't good enough to sustain interest for that long.

So that's that. Eleven songs down, one to go. But what would it be...?