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Posted by: Gilmore Jun 14 2009, 11:58 AM

Hi there!

Man.....what a song. If you like classic rock then this one has got it all. It starts out as a ballad, and ends in a marathon guitar solo feast, that uses every trick in the classic rock book. I remember when I first heard it around 1993, when I was 19. My friend made me a tape with few 70´s rock songs, but then I was discoverying all these old great bands. I went home and put the tape on, and lay in my sofa and after a while I fell asleep. When I woke up the tape had ended, but I remembered this crazy and endless guitarsolo in my dream, and thought.....what the hell was that??? Few weeks later when I popped the tape in again I realized that the solo was from Freebird of course, and I have been a huge Skynyrd fan ever since.

It took me a while to record and mix this. Lynyrd Skynyrd is a 7 piece band, so a lot of tracks were used, but I will break it down for you briefly:

Drums: Superior Drummer 2.0.

Bass: Trilogy, I usually play the bass myself, but the extensive guitar work in this song was plenty, so I just used midi.

Organ and piano: I played this myself, using my new Keystation 88. I used NI Acoustik Piano for the piano Intro and NI B4 II for the Organ intro and vocal substitute.

Accoustic guitars: 6 and 12 string Ovations.

Rythm guitars: This is double tracked, played on Gibson Les Paul, for both tracks. The rythm in the solo section is a bit tricky. It´s mostly in an upbeat tempo, and the rythm pattern changes every 4 bars or so.

Slide guitar: This was tricky since I don´t play slide much, and I don´t have a guitar properly setup for slide. But I put a set of 11´s on my Epiphone Sheraton II, raised the action a little bit and used a thick wall glass slide, I had some tuning and intonation problem, but it sounds decent. Gary Rossington put a screwdriver under the strings at the nut to get a even height, but I didn´t do that. He also tuned his B string down to G and picked both strings at the same time to get some swirling effect, like on a 12 string, and I did just that. Rossington used a medicine bottle for slide.

Lead guitars: Man everytime I hear this solo I get chills down my spine. To get this sound you must double track the solo, the first parts are played in unision, but then the guitars start to play different things. I tried to follow the studio version, but some times it´s hard to hear what´s going on so I had to improvice a little on few parts when the guitars are playing different lines, witch is fine, because Skynyrd never played it 100% the same, but the main elements are there. I used my Gibson SG 61 reissue for the left channel and Gibson Les Paul for the right channel.

My computer almost gave up on me during this project even though I have a pretty decent computer with Dual core and 4 Gb ram. I´m using 32 byte system now, but I´m gonna switch to Windows 7 64 byte soon and add another 4 gigs of ram, 32 byte systems just don´t cut it for heavy music producion.

Well this was fun, and I hope you like.

Ps: I really got blisters on my fingers after this, probably because i havent been playing alot lately.

 Freebird.mp3 ( 14.1MB ) : 444

Posted by: Bogdan Radovic Jun 14 2009, 12:32 PM

Wow amazing cover man!!! It must have taken you a lot of time to record and mix all of this! Production is great, especially acoustic guitars sound beautiful !

Posted by: Ivan Milenkovic Jun 14 2009, 01:58 PM

Oh man I love this song, I've heard it million times, specially while I was playing GTA SA

You did excellent cover, really great project man! I was hoping for some vocals, but sounds cool without them as well.

Posted by: Berglmir Jun 14 2009, 02:44 PM

Gratz - amazing cover & great playing.
How long has it taken you to make this recording and what did you use for recording software?

Keep on rocking!!!

Posted by: Gilmore Jun 14 2009, 04:03 PM

Thanks guys.

It took a while to get this together, but most of the time was spent learning and practicing all the parts. I use Sonar 8 these days. I guess I could do a project like this in one weekend, learning and practicing included, if i had the time. But I never have a free weekend for myself, so some project can lay on ice for some time before I can finish them, I mabye do a session for an hour here and there.

You hoped for vocals Ivan, but I am no singer, but if anyone wants to sing this, then please do, I can replace the organ with good vocals.

Posted by: skennington Jun 14 2009, 04:14 PM

Sounds awesome man, very well played and produced!

Posted by: Gilmore Jun 14 2009, 09:04 PM

Thanks skennington.

One question guys: Is it just my ears, but do you think the slide guitar is slightly out of tune on some notes? I had some problems intonating the guitar I used, so the notes from the 12th fret and above sounded a little out of tune, so I had to tilt the slide a little to avoid that.

Posted by: sted Jun 14 2009, 09:36 PM

Sir I take my hat off to you, truly one of the greatest songs and you did it exceptionally well, I was singing my little heart out! I am very, very impressed!!

On the slide thing I used to play a bit of slide and it can be a little tricky to get the note bang on as you are not fretting the note but hovering over the fret, I used to get round this by applying quite a wide vibrato with the slide, but I think you did brilliantly with it cosidering you dont play slide by your own admission.

honestly mate, truly awesome, would love to hear more!!

Posted by: Gilmore Jun 15 2009, 12:52 AM

Thank you, and I´m glad it made you happy.

Posted by: Sollesnes Jun 15 2009, 07:31 PM

This is great, congratulations!

Posted by: Fran Jun 15 2009, 09:10 PM

That was AWESOME Gilmore, hats off mate: your playing, drum programming, mixing... all is just awesome!

Keep them coming!

Posted by: Ivan Milenkovic Jun 15 2009, 11:44 PM

QUOTE (Gilmore @ Jun 14 2009, 05:03 PM)

Thanks guys.

It took a while to get this together, but most of the time was spent learning and practicing all the parts. I use Sonar 8 these days. I guess I could do a project like this in one weekend, learning and practicing included, if i had the time. But I never have a free weekend for myself, so some project can lay on ice for some time before I can finish them, I mabye do a session for an hour here and there.

You hoped for vocals Ivan, but I am no singer, but if anyone wants to sing this, then please do, I can replace the organ with good vocals.

Posted by: FilipofCroatia Jun 16 2009, 01:33 AM

Excellent dude - well composed all by yourself

Posted by: Fran Jun 16 2009, 06:41 PM

Just featured this at the GMC Journal

http://www.guitarmasterclass.net/wiki/index.php/Portal:GMC

Posted by: Gilmore Jun 17 2009, 10:58 PM

Awesome....

Posted by: Keep_Rocking Sep 1 2009, 07:48 PM

Just Amazing man!
I would love to see a video of the solo !
Congrats!

Posted by: playaxeman Sep 1 2009, 08:02 PM

Very, Veryyyyyy well done.

You did a great job. Bravo!!!

And congratz with your wiki journal.

Maybe can work this out and do a wiki on how did the Drums part with Superior Drummer 2.0.

and Bass Trilogy. Lot of people would like to learn how to make there own (backing) tracks and your knowlegde on this subject could be a key.

Posted by: Laszlo Boross Sep 1 2009, 08:23 PM

This is a perfect job! Sounds great.

Posted by: JamesT Sep 1 2009, 09:01 PM

Just awesome man!
You wouldn't believe how many hours I spent playing air guitar to this before I could afford my electric!

Hey, I might take a shot at vocals on this. If it's not too embarrasing, I'll even upload my take!