Sometimes Freedom Really Means Whammy Pedal

When I was working with New York-based musician Alex Bortnichak on his band Eating Club’s album Lose This Parade last year, he gave me a lot more free reign than one might expect from someone when you’ve never even met in the flesh no less worked together before!

But that artistic trust is part of what made working on his brilliant album so fun, and led from me just engineering the drums, to then playing all the bass, a bunch of guitar, and ultimately mixing and co-producing the record.

Today I wanna take a look at “War Story.” I played almost no rhythm guitar on the whole album, it’s all Alex, and the sounds are so signature and unmistakable that when for various reasons I did a rhythm track on this song - I had to focus not on getting it to sound “good,” but rather getting it to sound unique and lo-fi in a cool way.

An old Applause student guitar both miked up and also put through a little amp on a semi-overdriven setting seemed to do the trick, and helped glue the track together.

But it’s the end of the song where Alex asked me to put a guitar solo that was the most fun - I had recently gotten a Line 6 M5, and while tooling around with it I found it had a Whammy Pedal modeler. Well that’s something I’d never messed with before. So without practicing too much, I opened up “War Story”, headed to the end, and hit record!

The result is my first, and perhaps last, whammy pedal solo- not cuz it didn’t come out good, we both loved it. But just cuz, well, it’s not quite my thing. But I sure appreciated being given a very open and blank canvas when it came to expressing creativity on this record. Check out the whole album at https://eatingclub.bandcamp.com/album/lose-this-parade and listen to “War Story” below.