capes at full flap

yesterday was a nice leisurely day at the studio. it didn't start off that way. once we got to the studio, it took some time for the dvd's to be copied over to the G5 at the studio. so after a while, i decided i would start dialing in the distorted guitar sounds i needed for the days work. i didn't get very far. seemed like a preamp tube in the house marshall amp, the only guitar amp there, was going bad. i was instantly a little worried because i had a lot of clean guitar to do as well. we decided to hook up the bass amp and see what kind of unique guitar tone we could get through that, but it had some major problems too. no sound at all. not even a bad one. so at this point, i'm thinking the entire day is wasted. john made some calls to the studio owner and he was nice enough to rush us over a mesa boogie trem-o-verb. which was pretty fortunate because there were a few things i wanted to do with tremolo.
while waiting for the amp to show up, we decided to get started on the acoustic guitar. at the beginning, i was only planning to use it on the normal parts of the one song i always use acoustic on. but when i started playing it, we instantly realized its potential for creating some nice textures blended with the distorted guitars. it also added a lot of gypsy flavor to a few of the arabesque songs. it was a late 50's Gibson, and it really made me want to go shopping for acoustic guitars. it had a pretty small scale for an acoustic so making the transition from the mustang to it was pretty seamless.
once the amp arrived, we got to work. it had its problems too. the person it belonged to seemed to never ever ever ever use the clean channel, so the gain knob on that channel was pretty noisy. good thing the dirty channel had a "blues" setting and i was able to get a nice sound out of it. we layed down a lot of textural things that will give the album a whole lot of cape flap.