Three years ago around this time of year, I recorded a short song that was just me playing drums along with my then-new Ibanez JIVA10 guitar. That song popped up in the Memories page on my website earlier this month and I listened to it and thought "Hmmmm, I kind of like that but it's a bit shit, I wonder if I can make a new version that's better." (I wasn't great at keeping in time between the drums and guitar, I messed up the chord changes on several occasions, and managed to put a drum fill half-way through a bar so the whole song after that is half a bar off. Plus the drums were using Logic's built-in drum kit sounds which are awful, and the guitar tone is too bright.)
So I sat down and tried to figure out which chords I had actually been playing in the old song, then did a bit of playing around and came up with a decent chord progression that's kind of similar to the original. After that it was a case of recording everything, and I'm extremely stoked to report that there has been zero quantisation or flex-and-follow to tweak the timing in this song, it's entirely me staying in time without help! The chugging palm-muted section in the middle required a few takes because I've not really done much by way of palm muting before and I'm not very good at it, but the two main distorted chord sections were one and done. 💪🏻 This was the first song I've done with my shiny new Telecaster, and I had picked up Neural DSP's new Archetype Misha Mansoor X plugin for half price during their Black Friday sale at the end of last month so I had a lot of fun tweaking all the parameters in that and seeing what sounds I could get out of it. For the drums, in the section towards the end of the intro I managed to mess up the timing and ended up like a beat off just until the fill leading into the first verse, but thanks to the magic of MIDI drumming I was able to just shift those handful of notes across to where they should be. I also made a couple of additions in the form of just a single snare hit to a couple of the fills to improve how they flowed. If I hadn't messed up the transition from the first verse into the chugging section on the low tom, the drums would have been one take and done too.
Lastly the bass... I'm not very good at coming up with cool bass lines as it turns out, but I went with a very simple half-note root then fifth for the first half of the song, then switched to straight-up chugging eighth notes for the palm-muted section onwards and I think it worked well!
After the recording I did a lot of tweaking and fiddling to get the mix to sound right, including using Klevgrand's Korvpressor compressor plugin that I got for free from having bought my USB audio interface, and am extremely pleased with the results. When I listen back to my older stuff, it's a lot more obvious how far I've come with my musical skills!