Alpaca Cheese (live to disk, no overdubs)

So I have this Yamaha guitar I just bought, and for my first recording with it, I improvised a waltz-time blues instrumental solo in one take, with no other instruments or external effects, live to disk, and without any overdubs or edits. All the tonal changes come from playing softer and louder and using the volume knob. The result is “Alpaca Cheese” (5.3 MB MP3 file). And the name? My two daughters had been learning about alpacas, and were a bit confused about the goat cheese on my wife’s restaurant salad.

The guitar’s previous owner removed the three stock pickups and replaced them with a single retro-style humbucker, then bypassed the tone control and blocked the vibrato mechanism. So it’s a bit of a hot-rod instrument, and I plugged it into my eMac through my audio interface to GarageBand, with amplifier emulation provided by IK Multimedia’s AmpliTube 2 plugin. (There was no actual amp involved.)

“Alpaca Cheese” is available via iTunes and on the Podsafe Music Network. © 2006 by Derek K. Miller (SOCAN), Mastered by Les Thorn in New York City. Photo by Lincoln at Emerald City Guitars in Seattle.