How to Create a Terrible Guitar Tone (You’re Welcome)

In todays entry, I explain how pivoting from drums to guitar immediately introduced a whole new set of problems — mainly that I had no amp, no pedals, no real ability to play guitar, and absolutely no idea how guitar tone works.

This felt like the right time to introduce my brother to his new role as Corpse Water tech support, a position that would quietly become far more demanding than either of us expected. His first recommendation was a free plugin called Roots. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work with GarageBand, which led to installing Logic instead.

Logic worked brilliantly for about twenty minutes before throwing up a warning I didn’t understand. Turning everything off and on again bought me another hour before it happened again. It turns out trying to record an album on a MacBook with the power of an iPhone 4 has its limits.

To make matters worse, I broke a guitar string and had no idea how to replace it. At that point, another friend was promoted to motivator, session guitarist, and guitar tech.

The end result? GarageBand’s built-in distortion. Exactly as bad as it sounds.

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