The River - Instrumental to Finished Song
Before I wrote the lyrics to The River, I released it as a WIP instrumental.
It didn’t even have a bass line written (let alone tracked!) at the time - that was overdubbed afterwards, right before the vocals.
You can hear the before and after below:
Despite how electric this tune ended up, I actually wrote it on acoustic guitar. It's a very simply grunge-type riff in E. It's using major barre chords but rooted on the I, ♭III, and IV - very guitar. The main compositional hook at this point was the “push” on each raised chord, which I thought gave it a kind of bluegrass-like momentum.
In fact, on the day I came to record it, the G string broke, which pulled the chords from major into ambiguous power chords. When I overdubbed the ukulele (more on that later) and electric guitar parts, I leaned into this: in the couple of bars leading into each chorus, I shift fluidly between the major and minor third.
Sonically, I wanted the record to have some low-gain driven electric guitar on it, but wasn't sure exactly what it would be doing. When I sat down to track it, I kept hearing this mid-register note in my head, repeated in quavers (eighth notes). I laid that down, but accidentally found the pushes hit even harder if I left a gap just before each one landed. That became one of the rhythmic signatures of the song - surviving as the lead guitar hook you first hear at the very start of the track.
For the second layer of that hook, there's a mistake I decided to keep and amplify: on the second full pass, I played the first note completely wrong - a semitone flat - and bent it up to pitch as I went. I really liked how it sounded alongside the correct take - at first clashing, and then sliding up to meet the other note where it is - almost like double vision blurring apart and then converging. I kept doing it for the rest of the take and left it in.
Instrumentation Notes
My favourite instrument on this record is the ukulele. I use it in a number of ways:
- As the banjo-like alternative melody through the verses - a quaint, wooden nursery rhyme standing up to the rough-edged guitars.
- As the grainy whooshing textures in the transitions: I play these by muting the strings and moving my hand up the fretboard, tremolo picking with my right hand.
- As the hand-drum-like percussion in the dub breakdown section. Again, it's muted with my left hand, strummed loosely and loudly with a pick in my right.
For the vocals, I took a very different approach to previous tracks. I heavily saturated them, and leaned into overdriven, oversized delays. I exposed these effects even more during the breakdown.
The bass on this track was the first time I used what's now my go-to chain: my old Mexican Fender Jazz (possibly rolled off, I can't remember actually 😅) into an API LLX (clean), Cali76 FET compressor, Radial JDI.
The driven rhythm electric guitar is my Squier CV 50s tele through the API LLX (bass pedal, but using it here purely for its distortion) with gain maxed, into a practice amp (neighbours).
The lead guitar is a Fuzz Factory at minimum settings, and then into the same chain as the rhythm guitar.
There is also G major harmonica, you can hear most clearly at the end of the breakdown - throughout that section, it's emphasising the minor third and flat seventh against the E major chord.
The acoustic guitar is an Epiphone J200.
I doubled the looped clap (my own sample) with a few live end-to-end takes of clapping with a mic (no looping).
I overdubbed a shaker, again, no looping. It was in two takes: one steady throughout, the other looser, going off tempo for emphasis (rapid shakes) to double the cymbal crashes and act as a very quiet alternative cymbal.