'Without Wings'

[wingsdad]

I’d started teaching my son, Jim, how to play guitar when he finally expressed a real interest in it at the age of 12 or 13. But he didn’t really get serious with it until around 16 or 17. From that point, he worked at it all the time and was after me daily to stay with him. He wanted to learn how to write songs as much as he wanted to play guitar, so I taught him what I knew about both.

Here, then is one of the first songs Jim wrote, at the age of 19.

We originally recorded it in the summer of ‘95, on a Yamaha MT120 4-Track cassette machine using a Sony stereo cassette deck for mixdowns & submixes. I took what amounted to 8 final tracks and digitally remastered and remixed them on a Yamaha AW16G DAW in 2004.

I’ve still got all of the gear used to make this recording, especially the guitars, which I’ve posted about often around here, but never posted clips of these particular guitars, or of my playing, other than one track with another guitar. Until now.

Jim does the vocal (Shure SM-58) and rhythm guitar (’71 Guild D-40 with a Seymour Duncan SD-1 magnetic soundhole pickup, thru MXR 10-Band EQ and Yamaha EMP100 adding chorus & reverb to simulate an electric 12-string. I handle the ‘drums’ (Yamaha RY-10 rhythm machine, programmed w/ accents & fills on the fly), Bass with ’78 Fender Musicmaster (short scale) thru the MXR EQ, ’82 Rickenbacker 360-12BWB electric 12-string and ’81 Fender THE STRAT electric lead guitar (both thru ’82 Scholz R&D Rockman).

I'd like to thank strummy and cb for encouraging me to put this out here. It took them a long time to convince me.

Today is my son Jim’s 33rd birthday. If you’re interested, click the link to box.net, download &/or play it. It’s a 128kbs mp3 file, so the quality is pretty decent, IMHO. Loud is good.

Without Wings – © wingsdad music 1996

Thanks for listening.