This one was fun and took a little thinking about how to go about completing. I think it’s a fitting end to the Jamuary Song a Day challenge.
I’ll write more later!
Today’s challenge was “Your Fav Band” which, for many years, has been Guns N’ Roses. I’ve seen them quite a few times and they are the only band that I’ve ever seen on two continents (North America and Asia). Needless to say, however, to try to even replicate their sound would require a bit of work.
I knew I couldn’t do the guitar, I laughed at the thought. I mean, any attempt would be little more than a tribute. The drums I could probably do. Bass, I don’t know. Percussion, can’t say I’ve really listened all that closely though I know Dizzy is one of the few long-standing members of the band, and his work on the band’s version of “Sympathy for the Devil” was phenomenal. And Axl’s scream? Nope. At least not in any serious attempt.
So, it came down to what part of the band I would and could do. Would I reach back to their early days of the 1980s with GNR Lies (which was recorded before Appetite for Destruction but released after), or would I go more modern with their latest album, Chinese Democracy?
My immediate thought was to replicate some of “Sympathy for the Devil” which they played for the Interview with A Vampire soundtrack back in 1994 but, what stopped me, is that I’ve done that before elsewhere. It would be more of the same.
I was a bit lost knowing that I wouldn’t be able to directly replicate what they could play. So I sat down with the iPad guitar and started strumming away. GNR mostly uses distorted guitars in concert, Hong Kong being the most recent concert of theirs that I had seen.
Then the thought struck, what if, like my favourite band, I simply ended the show like they did? A stadium ending to a rock concert?
And that’s the idea I pursued.
Layer upon layer I put together what is similar, but not exact, to what’s known as a “concert finish”, an extended instrumental jam that’s ended with one last pump of vocals and music. In GNR’s case, after playing Paradise City, the band launches into a full on instrumental jam. This goes on for quite a few minutes before Axl returns to stage and, paying tribute to where they a performing by screaming out the city name, country name, then coordinates an end to the show by screaming “Good fkn night!” Then they bow.
I knew I wasn’t going to try an entire song, rather just the concert finish itself. I figured this was appropriate given that it was the end of the Jamuary challenge month.
I started with guitar and tried to do some fancy finger picking, which only partially worked out. Since the iPad has a small screen there’s only so far I can go up the neck of the guitar. I had trouble sustaining my triplet fingering technique on a flat screen, I couldn’t imagine doing this on a real guitar. I then added another rhythm guitar section to this just by strumming along.
Next I did drums. At first I tried to a click track but that was throwing me off given the tempo of the track. I figured a concert ending wouldn’t go by a click track anyway. I had to record the drums in two separate takes because I couldn’t coordinate my fingers to hit the drums and hi hat at the appropriate speed, so the hi hats and cymbal work are on separate tracks.
Next was bass which I tried to mimic some of the guitar picking.
I then threw in some bongos and congas.
Finally some crowd noise that I took from Logic’s sound library. This, in my mind, was a tribute to GNR’s early recording days when they overlaid a stadium of cheering fans overtop of their studio-recorded tracks. Apparently this was done as a bit of a joke and to give the band the image of being a little bit bigger than they were at that time.
You’ll immediately wonder where the piano went as GNR often has piano in their songs. I figured it would be buried and, besides, wasn’t really sure what to play, so I decided it would be best to leave it out.
To cap off the song, I recorded the only words in the song: “Beijing, China! Good. Fkn’. Night!”, which took three takes to do and no doubt had my neighbours wondering what I was screaming about, since the sun was still up.
For post production I left all of the instruments at their default values and imported them from Garageband into Logic. Here’s a look:
And, so, with that, I end my Jamuary Song a Day challenge month. I’m already looking forward to doing this again next year, if not sooner. I already have some ideas for what I could do differently but now that groundwork has been laid, it should get easier. First, however, I’d like to go through these tracks one more time and see if I can fix up anything before making a final version.
I hope you enjoyed listening along!