Tuesday 10 May 2016

The Walking Dead Theme - Metal Classical Shred: Ibanez/Takamine + Fracta...


Zombies and Guitars!


If ever there was a great combination it has to be scary guitar music and scary zombies. Seeing as I like both there was no choice but to arrange the theme music from the hit TV series 'The Walking Dead' for guitar.

I used 2 of my trusty touring guitars to record this track. Firstly I laid down a couple of rhythm tracks using my classical Takamine TH5C.  I added an additional layer with a single track of natural and artificial harmonics. The guitar was recorded dry directly into the Focusrite 212 and some mild compression, delay, and reverb was added in post. memory I used the following tuning -

Tuning:

6 - C
5 - G
4 - C
3 - G 
2 - B
1 - E

The other guitar was my Ibanez RG8527Z in standard 7 string tuning. I used 3 tracks for the heavy harmonised guitars with a little bit of panning left and right to spread the guitars out in the field but not as far as the classical guitar. I prefer electric guitars to be closer to the centre of the mix.

Solo Breakdown:

The solo that kicks in at 1:23 uses several different scales - C minor, C melodic minor, C harmonic minor and C Hungarian minor. Technically speaking I use a few things like ghost bends (pre-bends), whammy bar vibrato and dips. I use aggressive picking in sections just to emphasise several bends and near the end I do a quick ascending run to build excitement before ending with a fat bend. All electric guitar effects were provided by the Fractal Audio AX8 plugged directly into the front of the Focusrite 212. No post-processing was done on any of the heavy tracks.

I hope you enjoyed it. I had a real blast working this out, arranging it, and then recording it and making a video. It was a lot of work but also a ton of fun.

Let your fingers fly!












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