I love recording in general – but I have more fun than a basketful of monchichis recording guitars. The guitar, along with my voice, is my primary song writing tool and Crows Into Swine is definitely a guitar heavy album.
We spent about a week of 6-10 hour days tracking all the guitars on the album. Each guitar take we recorded had 4 separate tracks assigned to it – 3 mics in different positions and a direct track. Overkill? Hell yeah, but it worked out great! Check out the pic of my mic’d rig to see how it looked (3rd mic is out of frame). 
The only amp I used was my Orange Rockerverb 100 going through my closed back Orange 2×12 cabinet. I love this fucking amp and I only wish I could lug it to every show I play in NYC, but then I remember that it weighs as much as 1990 era Roseanne Barr and opt to take a small combo amp with me instead.
Miking the amp with the 3 mics allowed us a plethora of tone variation when it came time to mix just by blending the different mics in the mix. The direct track was in case we wanted a totally different sound for the take, but we never actually used those tracks; got everything we needed from the Orange itself.
To crank the RV100 to sweet tone levels, without leveling the building the studio was in, we used a hot plate- this basically allows you to crank the amp gain and volume to get the tube saturation you need but at quieter levels than normal. It was still fucking loud though.
My workhorse guitar was my heavily customized Gibson Les Paul Studio – love this guitar, it feels great and it’s been completely rewired and spruced up to my liking. The Wolfetone pickups I put into it sound fantastic. About 60% of the tracks on this album were done with this guitar. Another 30% were then tackled with my Guild S100 – which lent a really different kind of sound to the proceedings. A lot of times we would use the Guild to double tracks that were laid down with the LP as the Guild has this heavy yet naturally phase-y microphonic sound to it. Some clean tracks were done with my totally unique sounding Carvin Holdsworth model guitar and a few accents (like the slide on Old Sad Laughter) were done with my Gibson Flying V for that in your fat face midrange that V’s excel at.
I used more effects and pedals on this album than anything I’ve done thus far. Primarily a Micro POG and Phaser at various points. Didn’t use any delay on the guitars – if you hear any on certain parts it’s because I actually went back and played the same parts a split second after the original to create my own delayed parts.
We went nuts on the feedback tracks for Conversations With A Knife. Check out the pic of my Carvin set up for this song. 
Yes, that’s a plastic fork in the strings. For one of the tracks we just set it up in front of the amp with the fork in between the strings and I played my effects pedals with my hands like they were a singular instrument. We did this for a lot of the feedback tracks (different guitars, sans fork) to get various ghostly banshee guitar feedback performances.
I primarily improv my solos. I basically create a few points I’d like to hit on a guitar solo and then let the paths to get to those points sporadically fall into place. A style or laziness? BOTH! I do it with my vocals too- always fun. I’m happiest when I have room to improv on performances. Just sucks when you have to double a part and have to figure it out after you’ve played it! The tone for the solo on Anthem is me using my wah pedal as a filter. Same thing with the lead parts in Kingdoms. The solo for Waiting for a Song is a combination of working the wah and rolling off my tone knobs – I switch pickups half way through that song too to match the changes in the music.
I’ve gotten eye-rolls when I say this, but most of a guitar players tone comes from their fingers. I have erratic nervous fingers that like to get intimate with my guitars like an awkward kid undoing a blouse for their first make out session. And that’s the way I like it.
In listening sessions before mixing the album we decided that Crows Into Swine and Caught In The Wheel needed some lead guitar parts – so I laid down the fuzz solo for Crows and the spacey solo for Caught using my pedals going directly into the board. These two solos weren’t scoped originally, there was actually a vocal part in Caught that we removed that the solo replaces.
So that’s it in a cracked nut-butter shell. Never had as much fun recording guitars as I did with Crows Into Swine. I don’t want to bore you with my stream of consciousness typing any longer so if you’d like to know more about the guitars for this album just shoot me a line.
