How I Wrote and Recorded “Why Should I Make History”
How I wrote “Why Should I Make History” Thanks for checking out my series on the harps and FX I used to record “The Lucky One!” If you haven’t heard the rest of the pieces in this series, check the record out on CDBaby. I’ve…
The Harps and FX I Used to Record “96 Tears”
“96 Tears,” the cover song that closes my record “The Lucky One,” is a perfect teenage-stupid song about unrequited love (and self-pity, of course–it’s a teenage-stupid song!). The original is as messy (the organist makes an outright mistake at one point, and the structure is…
The harps and gear I used on “Double Lucky”
As a rule, most of the pieces on “The Lucky One” have somewhere between three and five harmonica parts in the mix. “Double Lucky” is an exception, with only two harps, and I think its simplicity makes it a good place to start my series…
Making the Harps a Little More Grippy
When I recorded with the band in Philadelphia for my upcoming record “The Lucky One,” we had to turn off the air conditioning in the studio every time we did a take, and that room got pretty toasty after a while. On some of the…
More from “The Lucky One”: Make The Noise You Came To Make
Like other pieces on “The Lucky One”, “Make the Noise You Came to Make” relies on a horn section made of harmonicas shifted down one and two octaves. To that we add an amped blues sound with a Whammy that shifts the pitch down a…
A Mysterious Piece of “The Lucky One”: Deeper
“Deeper” has been in my repertoire for years. I recorded a version of this piece for my subscription list, a decade or so ago. The original had a few harmonica parts and a lot of cool synth sounds, many of them courtesy of the hard-edged…
A hard-rockin’ piece of “The Lucky One”: Double Lucky
The basic structure of Double Lucky, one of the hardest-rocking tunes on my record “The Lucky One,” is a double blues: 24 bars, with 8-bar vamp sections between each 24-bar form. There are variations in the turnaround in each 12-bar section. Bar 12 ends on…
Huntersounds RP500 Licensees: Get Ready for the “Lucky One” patchset
I put together a lot of customized sounds for the Digitech RP500 for my upcoming record “The Lucky One.” A number of those sounds are specifically designed to work together in a loop, i.e. they’ve been engineered to fill in the audio spectrum without clashing….
An Outtake from “The Lucky One”: Waka Blues
The sessions for my upcoming record “The Lucky One” are taking place in Philadelphia in the third week of September, and preparations are feverishly underway. My producer, Ed Abbiatti, passed on this piece, a basic blues driven by an auto-wah harmonica part. If we’re not…
Another day, another (country) session
I took some time off this week from working on the songs and arrangements for my upcoming record, “The Lucky One,” which is set for recording in the third week of September in Philadelphia, to record harmonica parts for Austin TX producer Bobby Flores. (Congratulations…
