www.betika.co.uk
Over the weekend I've been working on arrangement of a new song entitled "The Great Bear". It's something I've been working on for a while, not because it's been particularly hard to write but because the writing process has found me inadvertently straying uncomfortably close to horrible rock cliche. I've been aiming towards a slightly harder, darker sound, but I've been very conscious of the fact that in doing so I'm toeing a very fine line beyond which things cease to be death-pop (or whatever it is that Betika do) and start smelling like the boys' changing rooms at secondary school. The main cause for concern has been the two electric guitar parts, and how easy it is for them to overwhelm the singing in louder songs, and the key to getting them right came from an unexpected source.
My dad has been clearing the remainder of my stuff out of his house (all the stuff I never had room or need for when I discovered the wonderful world of rented accomodation) and delivering it to me in cardboard boxes. While sorting through one of these boxes on saturday I came across a copy of Guitarist magazine from about 1984 that I bought at a car boot sale because it had an early (pre-"Hatful of Hollow") interview with Johnny Marr. It was great from a guitar-geek point of view, because he explained in quite a lot of depth how he set his amps up (a Fender Twin and a Roland Jazz Chorus), and it led me to start messing around trying to recreate his sound, and in doing so I turned on the Chorus effect on my practise amp, which had a curious result. If you're not familiar with Chorus, I guess the best way to describe it would be as a big button marked "80s", think "A Forest", "The Killing Moon" or "This Charming Man", the slightly wibbly guitar sound on "Brass in pocket" or Kirsty Macoll's "A New England". Ot the into to "She sells sanctuary". It was an effect that everybody used back then but almost nobody touches now, so tied is it to that particular period of time. But touch it I did, and mysteriously the new sound made my fingers go in all the right places and in no time I had two nicely complementary guitar parts worked out, albeit guitar parts wearing outsize black jumpers, eye shadow and biiiiig hair. The important thing was that the notes were right - all I had to do was not use chorus and suddenly we were back in the early 21st century. Not difficult really, as between the three guitarists in Betika none of us even owns a chorus pedal, just the built-in effect on my crappy practise amp that never leaves the house. Happy that I'd cracked a difficult musical nut, I got back to the job I'd become distracted from some time previously - sorting through boxes of my teenage junk. And you'll never guess what I found in the next box I looked in:
A Chorus Pedal!
The co-incidence was strange enough, but stranger was the fact that I have absolutely no recollection of ever having had this pedal in my posession at any point in the past. In the middle ages this kind of thing would have been hailed as a sign from God, if not a full-blown miracle (or maybe witchcraft) and probaly brought to the attention of the pope. I'm not a religious person, or particularly superstitious (unlike my magpie-saluting girlfriend), but I find my instinct is now to use the thing...but at the same time I have serious reservations because I know I'd be getting dangerously close to '80s pastiche. I'm deeply torn.
Wouldn't hurt to try it, I suppose?
