I’d been experimenting getting a good guitar tone on Apple GarageBand and ended up coming up with these two recordings:

Moody

Yes I suck as naming my music, my brother knows about all too much  This one starts out as trip-hop influenced piece with bluesy guitar solo and then progresses to a more upbeat bass-heavy track while still maintaining the blues element. I use a GarageBand’s Electric Piano sound for the affirming chords that piece is based on and distorted it slightly with the overdrive effect, with the gain turned up just a notch. For the guitar sound I had been experimenting quite a bit, trying come up with a nice tone which could be used as a clean tone with the guitar’s volume knob turned down. And I was also trying come up with a tone which sounds like the delayed sound John Petrucci uses in Dream Theatre’s Presense of Enemies Pt 1 which you can also see here. The bass tone is pretty generic and the drums were just drum loops which come with GarageBand.

Classic Rock Riffage

This one’s definitely a work in progress. It utilises pretty much the same guitar tone used in Moody except the volume knob in the guitar is turned up completely so that there is maximum gain. The main riff is reminiscent of the classic rock and hardrock riffs during the 70s. The bass is also made to resemble the bass sound in the 70s. It was played using a pick instead of fingers the way I normally like to play bass. The middle section solo is placeholder for a future vocals hopefully and a shorter solo.

Deeper Within You (just a random name)

My attempt to use a clean arpeggio with a distorted guitar lead sound. Kind of sounds like Pink Floyd a little bit, just a little part of it. The later part just a riff I came up with earlier which I just plugged in. I like it in metal when there isn’t any backing guitar when they play a guitar solo and you can hear the bass real nice. It becomes like an interlude. Dream Theatre does it so does Pantera. And that’s what I’ve tried to do for the solo at the end.

And on a different note, I’M GOING TO WATCH DREAM THEATRE LIVE. I bought the tickets yesterday from Ticketek, and I can’t believe I’m gonna see them live. The concert is on 5th December at the Hodern Pavillion, will be a nice early christmas gift for myself. Haven’t convinced anyone to go with me at the moment. I don’t have anyone who shares my passion of Dream Theatre in my circle of friends but looking forward to meeting other Dream Theatre fans at the event. Dream Theatre rocks! I need to get myself the Live in Budokan DVD for warming up. LOL!