Finished recording all of the GATS guitar parts minus the solo (which I will probably finish Thursday, my day off). I apologize in advance for the tone. I wasn't trying to perfectly emulate the amps and pedals except when absolutely needed. I was mainly going for accurate parts technically. I believe I have them 99% right minus the solo. Will be posting audio (sorry no camera) soon. Parts: Rhythm 1 - All of the main rhythm guitar Rhythm 2 - Semi-clean, reverbed part at the end of each verse Lead 1 - Main melody lead, solo Lead 2 - Main melody harmony, second verse reverbed, dirty lead. Lead 3 - Tapping part I separated the tapping part because at one point that part, lead 1 and 2 and rhythm 1 are all playing on top of each so it didn't seem right to lump in the Tapping part with another lead.
-The jingling sound mixed in with the clapping on Given Up is Brad shaking his car keys around. -The main synth hook on Crawling started off as guitar harmonics played by Brad. Mike pitch-shifted some of them, added some additional effects to them, and loaded the edited samples onto an MPC to come up with the melody heard on the final recording. -There's a repeated "chirping" noise in Breaking the Habit that's not supposed to be there. There was some kind of audio glitch on one of the sampled drum loops that nobody caught until after the song had been mastered. By sheer luck, the glitch fit rhythmically with the rest of the beat every time it looped.
Great posts, Astat. I have a question by the way. Is that a guitar in the beginning of 'Waiting for the End'? I've never seen it being played live on a guitar, so I have my doubts. Anyway, here's an explanation on how to replicate the high pitched Synth on 'In My Remains'. First, take a listen to this short snippet : http://upload.keols.net/upload/In My Remains Synth.mp3 Recorded it with the patch I have, over the original song. Starts at around 00:14. For this, you'll need the Refx Nexus VST. On the Synth, there are patches by the names of "King of Buzz 1, 2.....8" under the 'Single Layer Leads' section. 1 and 2 work the best (I used 1). Anyway, select one of those. Now, you'll have to give it the glide effect, for which you'll have to go to the Portamento section on the Synth. If you don't know how to do that on Nexus, watch this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNZulcwMbdk Also, on the Portamento section, set the speed to 1/16D or 1/16. (I prefer 1/16D). Now, you'll have to go about 2 or 3 octaves higher on your Midi Keyboard using the octave button. High enough such that you're able to hit the C8 note (Synth part starts on A7, and goes on to D8, E8 etc. It's pretty easy figure out by ear if you listen to the live version of the song). And that's it. Pretty sure it wasn't actually made like this, but it sounds really close, so who cares.
Wait, is that the repeated glitch noise that's repeated throughout the song? Holy shit, I never knew that was a glitch.
I don't think it is. That one note in the repeating sequence that's an octave lower than everything else has a really synth-y *BLOOP* sound to it. Everything else is in that in-between "might be guitar, might not be" zone that a bunch of ATS/Living Things stuff is, but that one note stands out as odd to me. Just remembered another couple: -The bass part in Wretches and Kings uses the lowest string on a 5-string bass dropped down to an A (this is the only time Phoenix has used drop A tuning), run through a Z.Vex Mastotron distortion pedal. It's so ridiculously distorted that it doesn't even sound like a bass on the recording, but it is! -While the guitar on Burn it Down may sound like a Fender Strat, it's actually a PRS run through a Devi Ever Shoegazer fuzz. That pedal's been used on several things in the studio on Living Things and The Hunting Party, but so far Burn it Down is the only song it's been used on live (yes, Brad has a pedal in his rig that's literally used to play 2 notes in one song).
https://soundcloud.com/courier-music/sets/guilty-all-the-same-guitar-parts Me playing all of the Guilty All The Same parts. Didn't go for a direction recreation of the tone. And honestly, I couldn't play the solo lol. Being in an indie band for 3 years I've lost a lot of speed. I haven't played things like thrash or speed metal in a while so I just went for a slight recreation of the solo tone and the tremolo picking. Astat mentioned it before and I do believe there is the Hummingbird Tremolo on the solo. Unfortunately no other tremolo really sounds like that pedal. I think there's also a wah manually being opened throughout the solo. At the end I'm going nuts on the wah which I think is pretty close to the sound that happens at the end.
Thanks! I have a Special II with humbuckers. Without a Strat I knew I couldn't get that tone. Single coils just sound down right mean with the right tube amp and pedal. Out just found through a cranked Vox.
The "wah" sound is really just the combination of the Hummingbird itself and a setting on the Strymon Mobius, probably something under the Filter section. The other 3 pedals in there aren't quite as important, the MURF is just a filtering thing, the BigSky is just used for stereo expansion, and the fuzz sound isn't too crazy so you probably don't need a Devi Ever to do it. The effects at the end are the only thing keeping me from covering the song, I can get a decent Univibe sound from the Electric Mistress section on my EHX Epitome, but I don't have any kind of tremolo effect that would do the recording justice (I have a tremolo preset as one of the built-in effects on my amp, but the speed isn't adjustable so it's pretty much useless). Curious how they'll replicate the sound live because I can pretty much guarantee they aren't going to add all of those pedals into Brad's rig. I do know Brad's rig is getting completely redesigned for this tour though...
I have question the "congas" in the intro of figure.09 I read somewhere its a effected sample..of joe hitting the needle from a turntable..but I dont really understand that yet nother one..the intro to breaking the habit...you know where chesters scream distorts and everything kinda slows down...how is this done? third question I heard somewhere there are supposed to be car sounds in Lying from you...but I dont hear em nother one: the intro to numb...affected guitar like crawling? a little different question..does anybody have a clue why exactly the intro piano is "played" on an MPC instead of a normal keyboard like it is usually.
At work so I can only answer a few. Breaking The Habit would be a simple time stretch. A MPC is a sampler. You load sounds onto it and got the pads to play it. Traditionally it was used for drum sounds but you can put anything on it. They just load a single piano note on each pad and play the sequence. I believe he uses a Lemur now
According to the liner notes in the "Meteora" booklet, that sound was made by running the turntable setup through a distortion pedal and tapping a vinyl, resulting in the percussive sound you hear at the very beginning of the track. Nowadays, Hahn uses a Lemur and MIDI Fighters rather than MPCs to trigger samples onstage. For "Burning In The Skies", no-one else other than Hahn is free to play the piano chords so each chord is sampled and triggered individually. For "In The End", again, no-one other than Hahn is available to play the piano part and the number of notes is so limited that it makes sense to just trigger samples instead. Hahn already triggers some of the songs' distinctive synth leads the same way, so it's not much different with piano sounds.
There's so many sounds in Breaking The Habit I can't tell which sound is the glitch that shouldn't be there.
What about the syth in the intro of Numb? I searched a long time for that sound but I never found anything which comes close.... How is the sound made in the Lying From You and the strings of Faint?
As far as I know, they made it by running something through pedals .. for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhaI9nD8nzg
The Figure.09 intro is Joe doing needle drops. Record has different sounds on it, place needle in different spots, get different scratching sounds. If you only put it on the record for a split second like that, you get varying percussive sounds. The end of Breaking the Habit is just a stretched-out/glitched sample of the last repetition of "tonight" that Chester sings. The "galloping" sounds underneath it are actually a slowed-down sample of the "soldiers marching" sound effect from the intro to High Voltage, if I recall correctly. There are a couple things that could qualify as "car sounds" in Lying From You. The intro synth hook kind of simulates the Doppler effect (sound from a moving object changing pitch as the object moves by you), and there are also "tire screeching" sounds in the verses, like at 0:35 for example. The intro to Numb sounds more like piano notes with some effects on them, definitely not guitar. If you listen to the drum stem from Guitar Hero, it's the beeping noise you hear in there. It basically repeats every other measure, roughly at 0:11, 0:14, etc.