Recording Guide Guitars When You Can’t Play Guitar

In todays self-absorbed ramblings, I explain the thoroughly miserable process of recording guide guitars and guide videos for a session guitarist — despite not being able to play properly, not owning a tripod, and not knowing how to use punch-ins in GarageBand.

The first problem was tone. The distorted guitar sound I’d been using in GarageBand was so bad it was hard to hear the riffs myself, never mind send them to someone else to learn. After complaining to a friend — the same one who’d effectively given me the Jackson — he lent me a TC Electronic 550 pedal. Whatever the settings were, it instantly sounded like an actual amp instead of digital nonsense, and for the first time I could hear what I was playing.

Next came rebuilding the drum tracks. Because I hadn’t saved the original EZdrummer tracks, I spent an entire day trying to identify and recreate every loop I’d used in the demos. Once that was done, I pulled everything into GarageBand and started recording guide guitars.

That’s when I discovered I didn’t know how to do punch-ins. Every take had to be done in one go. To make matters worse, Adrien asked for videos of each part so he could see what I was trying to play — and I didn’t own a tripod – thus I collected a lot of footage of my ceiling and of my desk top.

After a lot of frustration, everything was finally sent off. Ten days later, the finished guitar tracks arrived.

Lesson learned: don’t make guide material harder than the actual recording.

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