Hello folks! After very courageous display on my last Live Stream it’s time for a quick summary and a more polished version (although I still consider it as WIP/parked for a while now) of Santana’s hit song called Europa 
I am still not 100% happy about it especially some of the faster bits where I choked, but honestly after countless amount of attempts to record it for last couple of months tonight’s first one and only take was the bomb so I am going to stick with it! Now onto the mystery as to how the hell did he get that sustain? On it! For those who are not interested in all my mumbling here is the final video, for those into this kind of nuances please keep reading 
I promise it will be long!
So after second-last RHCP album called Unlimited Love I read quite an exciting article where John explained some of his tricks he used while recording this album. This was before song Eddie was even out wide in the open where his gear and experiments with sound were clearly heard. So John mentioned that those last 2 albums were heavily recorded using feedback on his guitar. I have heard of the term before but wasn’t super aware of it and since reading the article and the process + listening to some of songs using feedback I immediately fell in love in the concept and started to read how can I do it myself? As in usual recording techniques in order to get feedback you need your amp to be SUPER LOUD - na-ah not going to happen here…
So I started to think what if there was a digital FX that could help achieve that? A-ha eur…eka (pun intended ) - I discovered two pedals. One is being Boss FB-2 and other Digitech Freqout. Boss was discontinued for some reason which is a real shame as it is a magnificent pedal in my opinion and… I have been very lucky to find a competitive listing on Ebay, I was able to knock the final price down and get it into my arsenal! That’s how it looks, quite small but don’t be misled - a very powerful gadget as you can see on a quick video below where I recorded my sustain using just FX on compressor side emulated by my Katana 100 vs using the pedal. What a difference eh?!
Why this song? I always wanted to cover a Santana song and this one was on top of my list from all his hits. I am super glad I did it, although not perfect I think I am ready to move on and try something else. After all it were long 4-5 months of drilling it day by day few times in a row!
Few people asked about FX in general - so long sustain notes are now discovered as to how I achieved it. As for the rest I had 3 channels set in total for this song:
Channel 1 - Crunch, Blues drive on 12 o’clock, Compressor on 10 o’clock, pinch of delay and 9 o’clock of reverb room.
Channel 2 - Clean, Blues drive on max, Chorus on 12 o’clock, Compressor and the rest the same setting.
Channel 3 - pretty much same settings as Channel 1 except I activated Wah pedal (Light Wah type) and I have put it on Input position and not post amp. The difference when I did it as post amp was too big and I couldn’t negate the difference therefore wah wasn’t as powerful as I hoped.
Quite a lot of channels switching throughout but so much fun (you can see my dancing feet clearly during the final video! ). If anything else guys you are interested in I am more than happy to answer questions, for now I think that’s it and please do enjoy the show!
I also have one final though after drafting all of it up - there is a big difference between low budget and even medium budget guitar! Man I was always type of guy thinking that it’s not a guitar, but player making playing sound good. Sure it is, but until I tried out my old Eastcoast on same FX settings as my Epiphone man I was blown away. Sustain on simple FX was like 4x longer on a medium budget, action is way better than the other one. Overall can’t wait for my next guitar (hopefully in next few months) which is definitely going to be a higher end one! TBC with more details soon I hope!
…and as far as I’m concerned you could have saved yourself this hassle because you could easily have given your live performance a topic here, I actually found that much more impressive because…well it was live 
…but I get it (100%) that you want to post a perfect session here,
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thanks JK!
