Just finished a cover of a Steve Vai song called Tender Surrender.   Wanted to do something different from my other posts.   This is a slightly different arrangement from the original having horns, strings and the guitar solo is a little different.   Of course, this isn't meant to be an exact duplicate of Steve Vai's version, he is one of a kind and really tough to copy.   I am trying different types/styles of music to work on my mixing skills primarily.



http://www.soundclick.com...&q=hi&newref=1

ok, i'll say it out loud! I really like it! I even like it more than the original. and i'm not kidding. you see i believe that Vai plays the way he plays because he can. But your playing has something that guitarists have only in the beginning. passion and energy!

very impressed. Congratulations!

Tender Surrender is like the holy grail of guitar instrumentals, so all us guitarists get protective when someone says they're covering it.  Got say I really like your version.  Gives proper homage to the original and adds your own mark to it.  Nicely done.

Great tones.  What is your equipment setup?

Giankap-appreciate the listen and comments, very kind.   I have been playing with different arrangements of this song for a couple years and finally decided to finish it.  I am very fond of the Vai original and thought it would be a fun experiment.  Glad you like it.

Marcos-Thanks for the listen, I was debating whether to post it for that very reason (being the holy grail with hundreds, if not thousands, of covers of it on YouTube)   I had a drummer friend of mine play the drum part with his Roland V-Drums, captured MIDI and then used Superior Drummer for sample triggers.   This set was the NY Avatar set.   Bass Part is Trillian.   There is a Rhodes piano from my Yamaha Motif.  The string and horn parts are NI Kontakt 4.  The guitar parts are all NI Guitar Rig 4.  I record all the parts with all effects intact except reverb and delay (I add those later).  This chain was my Ernie Ball guitar into a Guitar Rig Controller which is connected to a separate laptop computer running Guitar Rig 4, and then to an RME FF800 on my main DAW computer for recording.  I like to record the guitar through Guitar Rig rather than recording dry with Guitar Rig as a VST effects plug.   I get better results that way.  I have played with trying to mike amps but for me it is just easier to use Guitar Rig.  Plus my wife finds me less annoying with headphones.  Thanks again for the listen.

Thanks for the info.  Great results for not using an amp.

Guitar Rig does rock. I don't know how I ever lived without it. Oh yeah, I remember, I had a Digitech RP7, got destroyed in a flood.

This is really good. I never heard the original. Awesome guitar tones.

Great work, it sounds fantastic to me.  Great guitar work.

Thanks for sharing,
Tom

i can understand why Vai is a great influence to all of us guitarists, but i don't like that he constantly mixes his music with this monkey business of his while playing. He impresses me when he expresses him self with his creativity but not with all these faces he makes while performing. imo these faces belong in a zoo together with the monkeys.

and i love your playing because everything i needed to hear form this track was there!

Hi Mark, very good effort, didn't know this tune, like it. Has a nice latin feel to it especially with the horns, a few stray notes here and there in the horn part. Good guitar playing, listened to Steve Vai's after yours and wasn't all that more impressed. Good job. Do you use your setup with the guitar plugged in to a separate laptop to avoid latency or are there other reasons ?

Greetings, Rik

Bub-Thanks for the comment.  Really liking Guitar Rig.  I am just too lazy to mess around with amps, effects, wires, miking, etc.... anymore.  GR4 is pretty good and wide variety of sounds.  I use a trick sometimes to give the illusion of miking by re-recording my GR4 performance with a mike, from my KRK monitors.  Just add that track at a lower volume to add a little more dimension in some cases. 

Tom- Thx

Morenoise/Rik- Good question.  I always noticed when plugging my guitar directly into my RME with Guitar RIG in the FX bin that it sounded thin and weak when playing back.  I think it has something to do with the phasing with the pickups and the FF800, or something.  I already had the RIG Pedal so decided to try that out, it worked well so just started using it that way.   I guess the Kontrol Rig is more forgiving than the RME when it comes to guitar pickups.    Later I read an article with Craig Anderton where he was talking about digital artifacts and fizzy tones, and that using products like Guitar Rig with higher sample rates, (I use 96k) reduces the effects of those artifacts and gives a more analogue tone.    The fizzy high, shrill stuff is that noise you find when sweeping across your EQ frequency range with a narrow Q and high boost.  

So I didn't have enough horsepower on my DAW workstation to run Sonar and Guitar RIG at 96k so I just installed Guitar Rig on a spare laptop I had.  The laptop runs only Guitar Rig, with the Kontrol Pedal sample rate set to 96k.  The Kontrol Pedal then goes into my RME FF800.  I have Sonar/RME set to 48K.   As I am just recording audio from the Kontrol into the RME FF800, the sample rates do not need to match.   I found the result to be OK so have just stuck with it.  Also, I like to hear what I am playing in real time.  I know you can do that with Input Echo but the latency doesn't work for me.   I like to hear the entire context of the music behind the parts and when I set latency low enough to not have any noticeable delay, things start to crackle and pop.   This was just a clean way to do it.  Hope that answers your question.

BTW  - The Anderton info regarding amp sim sample rates is located at link below.
http://www.harmonycentral.com/docs/DOC-1652


Regards