This is the first article discussing my experiences in recording and studio playing. I hope it provides some ideas that you can use yourselves. I'm going to start by looking at the tune JB Steeling and discuss how we played it and which instruments were used. I will talk about the construction of the song and how things changed as we were recording.

The tune was written by fellow guitarist Tim Jenkins. Another product of London's Guitar Institute, he has jammed with me for about 7 years now and we've recorded a couple of pieces already.

Tim had been impressed with my progress on the sax and wanted to utilise it in a funk tune. He came up with some ideas and brought them over to jam with a month before the recording started. I immediately liked the 'verse' melody and felt it brought out the better aspects of my tone and somewhat limited technique. We played around with it for a while and I improvised a couple of variations on it.

Tim's idea for the chorus was mainly based around a progression that he wanted played with keyboard pads and some horn section backing. The ideas here were less solid although, of the course of the weekend, Tim worked out a funky picking pattern to use for this section. This was jammed out with me playing the keyboard chords.

The middle eight section hadn't been fully composed but Tim had a few chords that he wanted playing and a muted picking pattern to accompany them. We were unsure of how to complete this section but decided to leave this until we went in to record.

Given our previous recordings, we decided that we wanted to concentrate on getting down a good tune and put down small simple solos each so that we didn't detract from the overall music. Tim decided to take a verse after the middle eight and I took the chorus after that. To finish we would both play licks over the closing chorus.

As I only have one sax I decided to use that! It's a Yamaha Alto YS62 with a Meyer 5 mouthpiece, Rovner ligature and Vandoren V16 reeds. Recently I've started preferring Vandoren Java reeds but I used a V16 for this recording. I took my Roadhouse strat and Tim brought his Ibanez 7 string RG series guitar. We both played through my Marshall JCM 900 DSL amp for lead work and used the studios Fender Twin for the clean rhythm stuff.

Other assorted gear that got used at one point or another includes my Jim Dunlop Crybaby, THD Electronics Hotplate, Boss Compressor and Ibanez Tubescreamer. All of the delay, chorus and reverb effects were added from the studio's effects board.

Well I think I should be able to pan this out over 3 or 4 articles at least (and therefore use up most of the studio photos). Next time I'll talk about the first day of the two day recording. See you then.