So this is truly an outrage. If you are’t dialing your congressman about me after this, I don’t know what.
Let’s Stay Together by Al Green is one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded. I heard it over the speakers in a juice bar and instinctively tried to fit ‘Bat Books for Beginners’ into it. To my surprise it worked.
As you may know I had a bad finger injury and hadn’t been practicing at all. When I started to learn this song I realized I was going to have to get much much better before I could tackle it. For a Rock and Roll guitarist this R&B classic is much more difficult to play than it sounds. I broke my 1 hour rule big time on this song, it took me a long time to learn.
The recording went pretty well, I had a slightly different vibe in mind. I had wanted it to be funkier instead of sultry or whatever this is. I don’t have drums or a bass to keep time and create a groove so this is what naturally happened and that is what this experiment is all about. I also planned on using two different guitars in the intro: one for the initial bass call, and the other for the chimey guitar reply. Syncing the two parts was fussy and to me it didn’t sound any better than going both at the same time. It gave a bit of swing at the open.
There are several guitar cuts in there, I didn’t want to take weeks to be able to record this song so I broke the guitar parts up into pieces and fit it all together in post. There were also a few vocal clean up bits.
If I was to fix anything I think I’d take out the second chorus at the end. It takes up 20 seconds and doesn’t add anything.
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