Greetings. We’re back with another tune to be messed with. This time we’re honoring ‘Novocaine For The Soul’ by Eels. This was a fun song to work with. I really enjoy the anthemic, sing along nature of the song. Again, we stayed basically acoustic except for the bass guitar. The song has 12 string guitar, bass, mandolin, six string banjo and a little percussion with tambourine and egg shaker.
To give a wider, stereo feel the 12 string guitar foundation track was played twice and panned hard stereo left and right. I think giving a track a wide stereo sound is important and playing a duplicate instrument track is a great way to do it. The two tracks can be very similar, but will almost never be identical (unless you force that with computer manipulation) so you hear each track distinctly from each channel. We worked the same concept with the vocal tracks, recording the main vocal twice and adding two harmony tracks.
Another thing that made this song interesting was the key. We don’t usually change the song from the original key. Specific keys do give songs a certain feel. Major key versus minor key or in this case having the song in D flat instead of D. In the original song they did this by using capos on the guitars. We ended up down tuning the 12 string guitar a half note and transposing the chords so the guitar could be played in first position for a fuller, richer sound. A capo was used on the 6 string banjo. We also added a second mandolin track that acts as a ‘voice’, along the lines of playing a guitar lead.
We may not have said this before, but all the Messin’ songs are played by Electrostatic Rhythm Pigs. You can find these songs and the band’s original music on our SoundCloud account (we have links on this site). We’re also slowly adding all the band’s songs to our YouTube channel (here’s a link to our YouTube channel): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0vVN4p_KzvLg1DEuUSJoqw
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