The Tripwire Guitar and The Little Box of Wonders

Like previously mentioneded, the guitars on this song were really fun to record. Our main purpose was to make sure that everything had its own presence and distinct sound, so the overdub guitars would have to stand out from the rest in a big way. Instead of opting out for our amazing Tiny-Terror/Orange cab setup, which we would normally use to dub the tracks, I went for a near-clean Britisheque guitar, using my Gibson Les Paul and the Fender SUPER Reverb amp (which we also paired with our Orange setup on the Double Dragon rig) with just a little hint of gain. That guitar was essentially clean though, which was a total breath of fresh air because I am used to playing with nearly full-on distortion on most songs. From there on it was smooth sailing, you can really feel the guitar coming in and there is a real distinction between Martin’s guitar track and mine. Even on the main riff (at the beginning of the song) you can tell the difference, plus mine is panned pretty heavily for extra effect. I didn’t get to use my radio-filter FX (really just a guitar phaser pedal with the settings all fucked up), which is my favourite guitar sound in the whole world, but I’ll keep that in my back pocket for a later time.

Once the guitars were done (in record time), we could focus on filling the song with the perfect atmosphere and I have to say Harry’s Gym was the perfect place for that. Along with having an array of amazingly majestic instruments lying around, including the fantastic August Föster Grand, there was a little box full of wonderful and fun instruments to test out. I tried all of them and one that really stood out for me with regard to this song was the xylophone, it had the perfect spy feel to it. The lurking overtones of the dark street corner. The distant sound of danger and curiosity. So I played a few simple tones that you can hear augmenting the bridge towards the end of the song (where WRITE RIOT RIGHT goes from playing the main theme/riff to 4 notes over a drum solo). I think it added to the feeling we were trying to capture. Actually, over the years we’ve really wanted to introduce these little interesting elements to the songs, and it was really cool to finally have a song that had enough room for it. You’ll hear more of this in our songs in the times to come, especially our new member the Theremin. We also overdubbed the chorus with a Korg MS-10 for the added sound of desperation, and we’ll write more about that shortly.