Ed Driscoll
Friend of Leo's
“Slow Down” is a song I recorded in March, built upon a riff that began on my Lake Placid Blue Squier Classic Vibe '60s Stratocaster and originally recorded the month before as an iPhone Voice Memo, before building it all up from scratch in the studio. The drums are from Toontracks’ Superior Drummer 3, using the Eddie Kramer Legacy of Rock’s “Sparkle Kit” for a Led Zeppelin II vibe. The organ is a sampled Hammond from Reason’s 2007 Abbey Road Keyboards Refill, along with a Fender Rhodes out of the Reason Electromechanical Refill from the year before. The electric guitar rhythm parts were played on a Gibson 2000 R9 Sunburst Les Paul Historic reissue on the left channel, and a 1984 Fender R7 on the right channel. The acoustic guitar is a doubletracked 2004 Gibson Music Machine Hummingbird, with a capo on the second guitar for some different chord inversions. The guitar solos were all on the R9 Les Paul. The bass is my 1983 Fender P-Bass. The bass and electric guitars were run through various rack-mounted Line6 Helix patches. The female backup singers are East/West’s Hollywood Backup Singers, and the male backup singers are multitracked Eventide H9000 patches, as is the huge reverb on the last bass drum hit.
“Eclipsed” was based on a song I wrote and recorded in 2003, but lost the multitracks a few years later due to bad file management techniques. The original song was processed earlier this year in the lalal.ai demixing app, and then the stems it created were used as guide tracks to record new parts. (I also restructured the song and rewrote some of the lyrics.) Most of the instrumentation is the same as “Slow Down” above. Additionally, some of the organ licks were played on a Roland-Ready Strat into an organ patch on Roland’s VG-88 guitar modeling rig. The congas and triangles are old Sony Acid loops, and the Vibra-Slap near the end I played myself.
“Storm Clouds” was written December and January of this year, on two then-new 12-string guitars, a Yamaha LL16-12 12-String acoustic, and a Fender Squier Lake Placid Blue Paranormal Jazzmaster XII. The sound effect at the beginning is the legendary “Castle Thunder” from the 1930s Universal horror movies, and some rain sound effects. Strings are Spitfire Audio’s Abbey Road Studio 2 Strings. I played an assortment of hand percussion on the track including a cowbell, tambos, shakers, and castanets.
