Crazy, baby! In December I was asked by my friend Bradley if I would be interested in writing a guitar surf instrumental for his band, The Bye Bye Blackbirds. They wanted something peppy like this to open their live sets with. Holy crap! I was severely stunned yet extremely flattered.
After a few moments I decided that yes...I must do this! Sounded like a very fun challenge, and I do love the genre. I warned him that knowing my work habits, this could take a while, but he was fine with that and off I went.
I have several surf instrumental compilations on CD and immediately started to listen and absorb as much as I could. I have a little used Aria Pro II Strat copy guitar with a whammy bar and knew this was the instrument that had to be called into service. Twang time!
Fortunately for me, I discovered that most of these tunes generally consist of a few standard progressions. I needed to figure out how to play them, and then start interjecting them with a few twists of my own. The first thing I decided was to put it in a minor key. That would give a bit of flavor that I thought would be unique. The second thing I felt compelled to do was to add a bit of dissonance. Always a good thing, and I relied on my experience with The Happy Eggs for inspiration.
Using the song Pipeline as a starting point, I was off and running. The intro just had to start with that patented descending guitar run! The main riff came easily after that, and since I wanted it in a minor key, it seemed to automatically come out a little creepy. I liked it, and hoped the band wouldn't mind it being a mixture of Vic Mizzy’s Addams Family meets Link Wray meets The Chantays. The end of the song was more or less a stock rock and roll riff that reminded me vaguely of some Beatles’ song... maybe Back In The U.S.S.R (?)
So there it was - a 2 minute peppy instrumental, but by now it didn’t seem very surf-like. Maybe if I added bongos to the drum program my problem would be solved.... Bongos! Of course! I put them in every time I did the descending guitar run and it worked like a charm. Hang ten baby, we’re off to the beach! Shake that sand out of your shoes!
I was determined to not get bogged down during recording, but as usual, I couldn’t help it. As relatively easy it is to play the parts, to do them cleanly took a while. It also took a while to come up with the bass part. The recording process also gave life to the song by letting me experiment with layering the last part of the song. Worked out quite well, I think - it’s always a good thing to end big!
I sent the mp3 to Bradley and sweated out the time it took for him to respond. I gave him plenty of leeway by making it clear that if he wanted to change it in any way, or out right reject it, all would be good with me. It was a very fun challenge, and I am extremely honored that I was asked. This was so cool! And even cooler than that, Bradley loved the song!
So here it is. I don’t know how to link a mp3 so if you are interested, please check it out on my MySpace site. And Bradley; thank you!
3 comments:
LOVE IT!!! You did an awesome job and I look forward to hearing the Blackbirds play it.
Thank you both! It was a blast!
Gil
That's hot, Gil! My girlfriend was just dancing to it.
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