Although the guitar is my main instrument of choice I’d have to say my second favorite is the drum machine (Iced Ink’s “White Box With Black Buttons” is a love song written for my trusty old Boss DR-670). To me it’s just as important to songwriting as the guitar is. More often than not when a song idea starts brewing in my head the drums appear first and I’ll reach for my drum machine to start punching away at patterns and parts.
If I had a lot of money lying around I’d probably own every different type of machine that I could get my hands on, especially the older ones – the Linn LM-1 being the holy grail:
Just look at that badass mofo! The wood trim is particularly striking. Although you may not know it you’ve heard that beautiful brown box on oodles of early-mid 1980s recordings. On Prince’s albums 1999 & Purple Rain the Linn LM-1 is basically a featured band member. My favorite Steve Vai album Flexable is crammed full of cheesy Linn goodness as well as albums by DEVO, Michael Jackson, Hall & Oates… the list goes on and on.
I have to do a demo video for Fishman’s TriplePlay MIDI pickup which is an amazing little doodad that you affix to your guitar and it allows you to get any sound imaginable (with the help of a computer). Piano? Banjo? Sitar? Church organ? Orchestra? You name it, the TriplePlay can make it happen. I’ve been wondering for a while now what I’m going to do for a demo video that would make it fun and different. While cranking Prince’s 1999 album a few weeks ago and the drum intro to Delirious popped on I thought Hey.. what if I tried making really fun, cheesy music that’s sort of a goofy nod to this?
The first order of business was to get the Linn drum sound. Over the years I’ve tried various Linn emulators and although a few exist, none of them have come remotely close to the real thing. With the old school Prince recording fire lit under me arse I searched the Googles hoping things had changed for the better since my last Linn plugin search. Lo and behold some dude finally made one called the vLinn and I’ll be derned, it’s as close to the real thing as I’ve ever heard. It even looks like the Linn LM1. YES!!
Yesterday was a rainy day so I fired up the PC, grabbed my guitar with the Fishman TriplePlay on it and started to dig in. Once the vLinn was tweaked into Prince-esque submission I was in my mad scientist creative happy place where the world disappears and time ceases to exist. Eventually a 4 minute glob of sound entitled “My Name Is Prints” (featuring a slightly hacked up version of Iced Ink’s Stupidface chord progression) was born. It’s absolutely ridiculous – during its creation I found myself chuckling quite a bit and asking me What in the f**k are you doing? Why are you even doing this? which is usually a good sign to keep forging ahead, and that I did. Everything but the drums was played on my TriplePlay-equipped Les Paul. The icing on the cake is Izotope’s free Vinyl plugin which adds a nice subtle layer of dirty LP & record player noise on top of it all. I’ve been wanting to use that on something for years and this was finally the perfect opportunity to do it!
I guess this marks yet another musical alter-ego that has set up shop in my melon. Making this was way too fun to not make more of them. Without further ado, here is “My Name Is Prints”. Once I have a few more of these under my belt it’s demo video time.
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