Tracking Flipping Time

This installment honors the many requests I have had for a track-by-track rundown of guitars and amps on Flipping Time. It will have to suffice for me to say that all of the amps and guitars (with the exception of a historic reissue Les Paul) are old. The Marshall 4x12 cabinet (a particularly nice slant cab with original greenback 25 watt Celestions) and some of the amps belonged to Chris Rival, the engineer for the sessions.

Chris is an excellent guitarist, a great engineer, and a very patient man. He loves recording live and tracking loud guitars. Within a limited budget and time frame we put a fair amount of energy into mic placement to get the right tones to tape.

Because most of the performances were tracked live in the studio with the guitar amps in the same room as the drums, fixing mistakes and re-doing solos was not an option. Guitar bleed into the drum microphones contributed to the great live ambient sound of the CD, plus I wanted to remove the option of obsessively re-doing solos. Also, It is difficult enough to get guitar sounds without dealing with the brittle quality of digital recording so I decided to record to analog 24 track 2 inch tape.

Home Place

  • Melody and rhythm guitar: Telecaster/ Vox AC30
  • Solo: Telecaster/ 50 watt Marshall and Fender Super Reverb with a Fulltone Fulldrive 2 overdrive.
  • Melody and rhythm were tracked live and the solo was overdubbed. The melody part was also doubled through the Marshall.

Flipping Time

  • Les Paul/ 50 watt Marshall

I Know

  • This piece is an improvisation based on thematic materials from And Now We Know, the tune that follows it. I did the chord solo first and then added the distorted melody guitar.
  • Clean guitar: Strat/ AC30, Fender Pro Reverb, Tweed Fender Harvard with Echoplex.
  • Distorted guitar: Strat/ 50 watt Marshall (on 11).
  • For the echo on these two tunes we ran an echoplex into a separate amp - a tweed Harvard. The detuning effect you hear occasionally is the motor on the echoplex slowing down.

And Now We Know

  • There are two guitar parts on this tune. The melody part was tracked live without echo after which I added the textural guitar with the echoplex rig.
  • Strat/ AC30, Black face Pro Reverb, Tweed Harvard with Echoplex.

Ten Years Late

  • Strat/ 100 watt Marshall Super Lead with Fulltone ‘70 fuzz, Fender Princeton Reverb
  • Both amps were running side by side and, obviously, the Princeton was inaudible in the room! We brought it up in the mix for the cleaner chordal parts.

Footclappin’

  • Tele/ Fender Deluxe Reverb, Fender Princeton Reverb

Talkin’ About What

  • Strat/ 100 watt Marshall Super Lead (on 11)

Blues For Charles

  • Strat/ 50 watt Plexi Marshall and Black face Super Reverb, Fulldrive 2 added on the solo.

Jackalope

  • Strat/ 100 watt Marshall Super Lead with Fulltone ‘70 fuzz.

Bigger Than You

  • Les Paul/ 100 watt Marshall Super Lead (on 11).

The Wayward Way

  • This tune was written and recorded in the same day. The clean guitar was tracked live with the electric fretless bass. I went in, added a tube screamer to the same set up, and tracked the solo immediately. Later I had Marty Ballou replace the electric with an acoustic upright and double the melody on electric fretless. I also added another textural guitar.
  • Strat/ Fender Princeton Reverb through a Marshall 4x12, Fender Bassman reissue. The amps are split with a tc Stereo Chorus which is on for the clean tones and off for the distorted guitar. For the overdrive I cranked the amps and added an old Ibanez ts9 Tubescreamer.

Check the Equipment page for more gear information. 

Other pages in this section:

At the BluesCafe, Apeldoorn, Netherlands

Listen to sound clips from
FLIPPING TIME
and order it online at

Nugene Records (UK)

CD Baby (US)

Lesson

Here's a link to a lesson from Julien that is currently available on the TrueFire.com website.

It isn't free, but it is inexpensive — around $3 gets you an audio version (mp3) of the lesson recorded by Julien for Guitar Player's "Notes on Call" series as well as a .PDF version of the lesson as it appeared in the September, 1998 issue of Guitar Player magazine and a PowerTab version of the lesson examples.

Pentatonic Double-Stops Lesson