My part in Dial by Shineback

Dial by Shineback is now out.

This track, Here I Am, features some of my guitar playing:

Simon Godfrey, the madman behind Shineback, asked me to play something ‘disturbing’ to fill the gaps in between The Wizard Ramsay’s spoken word performance.

Most of the backing track was already there and there’s not much that’s rhythmic in it. It’s all big ominous chords and drones. So it made sense for me to play something with a bit of rhythm to it.

I read ‘disturbing’ as an instruction to play odd notes. They’re not random though, I’m playing with a whole tone scale centred on D – taking advantage of the symmetrical nature of that scale to slide up four frets and play the same pattern again a few times. It’s only right at the end that I return to a nicer, more ‘in tune’ scale for the last few notes.

My original performance was rough around the edges – as I’ve said elsewhere I can’t compete with proper lead guitar players on technique, what I have is funny note choice.

I spent several hours trying to record a version that had the same idea as the original but was better played. None of them sounded right so I sent Simon the original rough version instead.

Thankfully his inspired processing and choice of effects disguises how badly played the part was.

Thanks for letting me join in, Mr Godfrey. Its a great album.