I’m finishing up a collection of songs I should be able to play from memory, and my last selection before moving on to beginner Grade 4 was The Doobie Brothers “China Grove.” This was most humbling exercise I’ve encountered yet. At first I tried singing along while playing the rhythm guitar part Tom Johnston plays in their live performances. I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen. I tried singing to the other guitar part, which is a bit less demanding, but I couldn’t pull that off either. My voice is too low to sing in Johnston’s register, but even after dropping the vocals an octave I could not get it right, so I gave up and decided to cut out Johnston’s rhythm guitar from the album version, play that part myself. and add in the rest of the original song to my recording.
If you listen and notice anything at all I could do better or any bad habits you see me developing, please let me know. It will be greatly appreciated!
Having said all that, I had a lot of fun learning and playing this song. I hope you can enjoy a few minutes rocking along with it as well!
Great job on that, Jim. Well done. Such quick chord changes.
Sorry you couldn’t get the vocals down. I can relate to that. The high registers, are hard to impossible for me to achieve. A Capo helps sometimes, though.
The piece will develop further the more you play it: you’ll probably see or hear parts that could be improved; isolate those phrases and practise the improvements. There are a couple of short sections with no backing track where your timing is less precise: even with a backing track, keep tapping your foot so when you do go ‘solo’ the tempo is maintained.
Nice one. I think i have heard that song most of my life and i didnt realize that was the name. Hey i really was digging that rythem melodic run action near the end. That was sweet, and you seemed to nail it. I listented to that part a couple of times. You can hear there is a lead over it also but that rythem guy has a cool set of licks that you played really well also. Nice job it got me feeling some movment this morning with my 3rds sip of cooffee.
Thanks for the encouragement! No time for the rhythm guitarists to fall asleep during that lead solo! On the album version there are two rhythm guitars, one in each stereo channel. In some live performances I’ve seen on Youtube Tom Johnston would take the busier rhythm part, sing, and then take the lead solo. Impressive!
Hey Jim!!!
Way to go!!! Really tough tune & your playing does it justice for sure! After listening to your version I listened to the Doobies’ album version. Then played them in pieces listening to yours for a minute then theirs for a minute etc., I think my only criticism ( not REALLY a criticism) is that you could bump up the volume of your playing a bit vs the other guitar & the vocals… you aren’t “Lost in the Mix” but it just feels like the Doobies have your guitar part slightly louder. Otherwise, danged fine playing!!!
Kudos to you & your Silver Sky!
Thanks for the encouragement! That volume issue is a side-effect of me trying to be a sound engineer😒. Turns out the relative volume of my guitar seems to depend on what you use to listen. I played through my PC’s built-in speakers and headphones and the volume seems right. I play it using my iphone’s built-in speaker and I can hardly hear my guitar! Using bluetooth earbuds with my iphone the volume sounds right. If I knew the reason for the difference I could fix the recording.
You already know what I was going to point out. Your guitar level IS too low. I would attempt to bring it up to nearly over the top of the background recording.
I mix a fair amount and could offer some suggestions on trying to bring up your guitar level. Alas, I don’t know your signal chain or what you are using as tools to record your guitar and blend or mix it in. Share that and I might be able to help!
Thanks for the feedback! I could use some advice and better gear. The way I put this recording together was first to use a tool to download the audio of the album version of “China Grove” from the Youtube video. I imported it into Audacity in stereo mode, which generates two tracks, and found that Tom Johnston’s rhythm guitar part was on one track. Nice! I added an introductory beat track and synchronized it so that I knew at what beat Johnston started the solo rhythm guitar part. Then I stripped out the track holding Johnston’s playing and exported what remained to an MP3 file. To record the video I used a cheap USB video camera mounted near my PC, hooked up my Fender Amp’s output to my laptop’s microphone input, used the program kdenlive (My laptop runs Linux, so the toolset available to me is a bit limited) to record new video and audio tracks of my playing while the tracks imported from the MP3 I had mixed in Audacity ran. I had bluetooth headphones set as the audio output, so while recording I could hear the tracks from the MP3 but only the unampllfied sound of my guitar. One funny thing I discovered with this method is that while recording, my playing sounded to me like it was synchronizing with the tracks from the MP3, but during playback of the entire mixture my guitar part was delayed. I had to cut and paste and do some time compression on the the audio and video of that track to get it lined up with the tracks from the MP3. I also had to adjust relative volume so that my guitar track matched the volume of Johnston’s track more closely. Unfortunately, I did all this using headphones and never tested how it sounded playing through PC speakers. I now know that my guitar sounds much louder through those tiny headphone speakers than it does through PC speakers. Why? I have no idea. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Hi Jim!
Thanks for sharing how you produced this. With what you have for tools, you did a remarkable job overcoming many obstacles. Yes, better gear would be nice, but one has to start somewhere and you are off to a good start. I have not used Audacity for at least a decade. Some on here can likely offer more insight on that specific application. Or if you need further help, YouTube will help.
You are running a Linux box and try as I might, I had limited success as drivers. plug ins and more are limited in installation and workings. I am no Linus guru at all. I can only share my experience in trying to substitute it for a Windows box (laptop or whatever) as I personally find Win 11 is going the wrong direction for music production and even general use. Not looking to start a debate, but that is IMHO. You could look at Reaper, the DAW that has a native Linus app. That will help out and they have a library of hundreds of excellent how to videos that will show you how to do most anything in Reaper and Audio Production techniques .
The lack of decent basic gear is causing you to go through a lot of hoops you would not have to if you had such gear. I suggest you consider a 2 channel Focusrite AI, or Audio Interface. This piece of gear will become the center of your “studio” and music production. A low cost mic would be a good addition as well. Many on here can debate and share what they think is best. Perhaps as well, someone can share a good AI solution with full Linux drivers. More on this below.
Delay and your specific question on it. - There is all sorts of ways delay can enter into your recording chain or setup that you’re using. Suspect is blue tooth headphones, which I tried many years ago and had very poor results. I would hope this has changed by now, but maybe not and this is in the delay loop realm as an issue. Audacity itself used to have a poor driver for it that caused latency or delay. A lot of folks used “ASIO for all” and it was better, but still had a lot of latency. If this is still the case today, the Focusrite will or might be an AI improvement to look at. However, it’s excellent drivers are not made for Linus. It will work in “class compliant more” though. I personally have not tested this and perhaps others can chime in that have. Your guitar signal chain being plugged into you notebook is suspect too. There is just a lot that can happen there.
I don’t know if the above helps any. You face some challenges for sure. This is a bit off topic and might be best taken over to another area of the community that deals with these kinds of issues.
Keep up your excellent work in music and efforts to produce with marginal useful tools and gear.
LBro
