Tools of the Trade III

This will be a fairly short one, as there is not to much new here, but I'll go over it nonetheless.  I also suggested I'd talk a bit about the decisions I made composing/recording the tune, but looking back at how much I talked about the style and feel I was trying to achieve, I'm not sure it's really necessary.  If anybody has any specific questions, post in the comments and I'll be sure to answer.  Alright, on to the gear...

For the bass guitar, I once again used the Thunderbird model of the Variax Bass (I can't seem to get away from that T-bird). I ran it directly into the sound interface and used an effects plugin mimicking a tube pre-amp.

For the guitar, I've laid out essentially what the signal chain was below (modeled, of course). My Variax's ES-335 model was run into my Line 6 Pod, which placed a Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face in front of a Fender Bassman - the gain on each cranked to the max - followed by a tape echo before leaving the Pod. The Fuzz Face was only used for the lead guitar track; for the rhythm guitar part, it's just guitar, amp, and echo.



The one new element in my actual gear for this track was that I upgraded from my Pod xt Live to the recently released Pod HD500. I hadn't expected to rely this much on my Pod for recordings, but it's extremely handy to be able to record late at night, or not having to worry about ambient noise getting picked up by a mic. The xt Live is a very nice unit, but the HD500 had some new features of interest and boasted improve signal processing. From the few weeks I spent with it, I've been very pleased with what I've been able to get out of it so far.