Country Music’s Digital Surprise
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Q Stick

On acoustic guitar we had Mark Matejka, a former member of the Charlie Daniels Band who is currently signed to Dreamworks as the lead guitarist of Hot Apple Pie. Electric guitars often get more attention, since they make so much more noise, but great acoustic playing is every bit as valuable.

Mark Matejka's "high string" acoustic strumming brought out the country flavor.

Have a listen to Mark playing the intro and verse riff, and notice the excellent tone, even rhythm, and controlled dynamics (loudness vs. softness). Note that on your right channel you'll hear Mark playing what's known as a "high-string" part. In Nashville high-string guitar tuning, the third through sixth strings are tuned an octave higher than standard tuning. (Guitars tuned this way should have much lighter than normal strings, for example gauges .012, .016, .010, .014, .020, and .030 for a medium set, all of them plain except for the heaviest one.)

• High String Sound (356KB MP3)

Having people who can come in cold, play like that, and give you a keeper on the first or second take is bliss.

Mark played similar parts in the verses. In the choruses and solo, he did a rhythmic strum, which when mixed with power chords would make the overall guitar sound bigger than it would have been with electric guitars alone:

• Acoustic Strum (328KB MP3)

Touching Bass

On bass guitar we had Pat Lassiter, another studio and road veteran who has worked with Charlie Daniels, Tracy Lawrence, Michelle Wright, and others. Nashville bass players are seldom called on to be flashy. What they are, though, is solid and tasteful. An example on this session was the way Pat came out of the chorus into the second verse. He went up an octave for the end of the chorus, leaving it hanging in the air so that there'd be a satisfying sense of return when he dropped back into the low register for the beginning of the verse. One of the strings on Pat's bass was buzzing a bit that day, but it happened to work fine in the mix:

• Bass Part (136KB MP3)

I realized after we were done recording all the basic band tracks for all the songs that Pat had made only one mistake--and that was when one of his strings happened to break in the middle of a take! Now that I think of it, maybe that was the one that was buzzing!

Sample My Piano

There's just one keyboard track in this arrangement, dedicated to piano--as I said, I wanted to build a big sound without resorting to synths. The piano was played by Gene Rabbai, who has played with Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Griffin (of Bread), and Vince Gill.

Gene Rabbai adds virtual piano to the mix.

These days Gene gets most of his sounds from his laptop, controlled by a MIDI master keyboard. For this session he used the Bardstown sampled piano software. In the intro, while Danny and Mark were playing their guitar versions of the original keyboard riff, Gene played a simple chordal figure on a quarter-note rhythm. Note again the rhythmic and dynamic control:

• Piano Intro (284KB MP3)

Gene continued that quarter-note feel throughout the song, evoking the gospel-derived rock ballad sound defined by the Beatles and Elton John. In the choruses, he hit the keys harder, and also introduced little ripples of arpeggiation here and there to increase the rhythmic motion:

• Piano Chorus (160KB MP3)

In the second verse, Gene kept the energy higher than in the first, a common tactic for bringing new interest to the repetition of a section:

• Piano Verse (152KB MP3)