Long Way To The Top - Motorhead Version

Inspector #20

Inspector #20

Ambassador of Tone
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Been up most of the night tracking this. Guitars and bass are tuned to Eb and we dropped the key from Bb to A to make the vocals easier for me to sing. Still working on the final mix, but i will post the results shortly...or at least sometime this afternoon... :-)
 
Once I start producing, the damn thing starts cleaning up and sounding more polished. On the Motorhead version, it's really, really rough. I decided to use the Motorhead vocals, but produce a better overall track. Campbell mimics the bagpipes in his version, and I remain faithful to that arrangement and play the bagpipe section on the guitar.

Here's Motorhead's original:

 
Ok, here is the finished song with the vocals. I always track vocals last to see how good the guitars sound. On this recording you will hear my Gibson Les Paul in the left speaker and my Gibson SG in the right speaker. Both are played directly through the Blackstar 100 watt solid sate with no effects. At 1:33, you will hear the two guitars harmonizing the bagpipe line. At 2:42 there is a loud grating sound as I slide down the neck after the solo...I just left it in there. Although cut in the studio, the individual tracks were all cut in one take - good or bad.

I think it's too polished for a Motorhead style, and dropping the tuning from Bb to A wasn't enough to get a good "Lemmy" style vocals. It feels heavier than AC/DC, so I am not sure where this fits in.

What the Hell, I went ahead and added the vocals. The drummer and I already started re-tracking the drums and bass to speed up the tempo, because this song feels like it's dragging to me. I will make another version of this song - not quite so polished.


Thoughts???

LONG WAY TO THE TOP
 
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eSGEe said:
Sounds good---
All this is just done there at the house??? With a blackstar and a Fender 40 Rumble????????
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Other than the drums, Yes!!! Everything was done here with Audacity and everything is done via line out. Now the mix isn't great, so the song would need final mastering to balance everything and remove vocal pops, volume spikes, etc., but the track isn't really good enough to invest the money in. We have a mutual producer friend who works at Capitol Studios who has a real talent for mixdown and mastering. His home studio could easily rival any of the commercial studios around here, plus he can still record and process 3" master tape, record in full analogue with vintage equipment and just about everything else you can imagine.

The drums were tracked at my friend's studio. I laid the bass tracks down at his studio with my Ibanez and the Rumble 40 XLR line out. Even Ace of Spades was tracked on the Rumble 40. He has multiple mic's on the drum kit, so once we have a good basic mix, we export the drum track as an MP3. I take the file home and finish up my projects here most of the time. We work on music projects together often, so it's easy to get drums added. Likewise, I do guitar and bass for a lot of his projects, such as demos, radio jingles, commercials and the like. He is also a competent keyboardist.

Sometimes, I will get a call and it will be like, "Hey, this band wants to do a cover of this song by _______. You wanna lay down the guitar and bass???" Recently, I did a demo of "Roseanna" by Toto for a band who couldn't get it to sound right. They never knew how much guitar is in that song. Listen to Lukather's isolated tracks. The amount of work involved in playing that song correctly is mind blowing.

We already re-tracked "Long Way To The Top" and increased the tempo and gave the guitars a much harder-hitting sound. I'm not done with this song yet!!!
 
Sounds killer. Love the two separate guitars.
So you're covering a cover? Nahhh, it's always AC/DC to me..But I understand, and you put down an awesome version. Nice job Robert..rock it bro :dood:
 
Ok, so after spending a bit of time listening to the playback, I realized the intro guitar parts are lazy and dragging a little bit out of time. My picking technique isn't quite right either and, as a result, the gallop doesn't come out quite the way i want it too. I tracked most of the guitar parts when I was tired and it shows. The bagpipe guitar parts I borrowed from Phil Campbell's version with Motorhead and I think they came out pretty good.
 
Bocc69 said:
Sounds killer. Love the two separate guitars.
So you're covering a cover? Nahhh, it's always AC/DC to me..But I understand, and you put down an awesome version. Nice job Robert..rock it bro :dood:
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Ya, it didn't come out the way I wanted it. To be honest, I don't like the Motorhead version. It's really busy and lots of wah and dissonant guitar parts. I do love Lemmy's vocals though. Those are solid and will be TOUGH for me to duplicate.

I thought it would be a fun song to mess around with, but I have come to realize that when I produce things, I often go overboard and things come out sounding really polished and almost "poppy" sounding...as a producer, I need to work on breaking the edge so to speak.

This song is a lot of fun to work with and shows just how much you can do at home with Audacity and the Scarlett pre-amp setup. Everything is lined-out direct to the PC.
 
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This morning, I realized I have a very slight latency error on my copy of Audacity and that is affecting the time signature. My ear didn't hear it, but when Ace of Spades went out for digital mastering, the engineer noticed it. I am working on adjusting the latency this morning before I go any further..
 
gball said:
Very nice man. My vote for next Motorhead cover is "White Line Fever"

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Hey!!!

Well, we definitely took a new turn....what started out as a cover band, has turned into 9 original songs in less than 2 weeks, so now, the covers are being scaled back a bit, but WLF would be a GREAT one!!!!
 
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