Everyone's favourite this lesson folks! Guitars!

I know, I can't wait either. This video doesn't just cover the basics of recording guitars into a DAW, it also covers my thought process when I'm going into a production session adding guitars.

It's quite a difficult concept to get your head round, particularly if you come from a "Band" or "Gigging" background, but your productions don't have to be playable by a real four piece band! Usually we look at a band and think, "Okay so, rhythm guitar play the chords, lead guitar play some cool licks and solos." but we aren't restricted to this format when producing, we can arrange our guitars however we like!

In this song, I wanted to accentuate that point, so we're not going to use any standard power chords/barre chords, and instead are going to compose our guitar parts in very distinct sonic spaces. All without big chords, how?! Pretty cool right?
The best bit is, when you get your head locked into this way of thinking your parts can be incredibly creative and fill gaps that you never could in a normal band context. You could have FIFTY guitar parts in your song, and as long as they don't clash and all serve a purpose, why not!

Hopefully, by the end of this lesson you have a bit of an insight into how my mind works when I'm sent a song that needs some guitar. You'll have the technical tools to record yourself and you'll be able to add subtle guitar parts when a big barre chord would be a bit much.

FOR NEXT TIME:

Practising these skills are difficult without trying them in the context of real songs. One quick thing you can try:

Mute the guitars we've added to the song
Add four new guitar parts

BUT

No two parts can be played on the same strings.
No two parts can be played on the same frets.

These two rules should force you to think about your guitar part in terms of "Low/Mid/High/Very High"

See if you can improve on the parts I've suggested in this course.