Dream Rig; or, Hoot Gets Very Excited About Guitars
Lately I've been on a massive Jamie Paige kick listening to the Constant Companions album on repeat, and it's been getting me thinking about trying to cover a song or two from it. However, my music tends to be more punk rock or metal in nature. The vastly different genres Jamie and I produce/write in isn't in and of themselves a complication, but it does require a lot of simplification and re-interpretation on my end due to my own limitations with skill and equipment. When I make my music, I tend to produce the drums via EZDrummer which can get complex and intricate enough, but the guitars are all done entirely on my Ibanez bass guitar. My skill level with bass playing limits my ability to accurately mimic Jamie's busy electropop arpeggiation, and the hard focus towards low-end notes on my bass guitar limit the range of notes I'm capable of producing.
Again, these differences aren't a huge problem, but as mentioned before, any cover of Jamie's music I produce would require a pretty significant amount of reinterpretation and simplification on my part before I can really consider myself satisfied with my version. I love working with limitations - it's the reason I consider myself a "graphic designer" despite working exclusively in raster graphics with Paint Dot Net of all things - but I worry my lack of equipment, note selection and skill might force me to make compromises I'd prefer not to make. Sure, I could just "get good," but I make music for fun and 'sweating it out' on guitar doesn't sound like too much fun to me either. I like the skill level I'm at.
So, with the limitations I have, what's a gal to do?
Look at rigs she can't fuckin' afford.
A few ideas have been ruminating in my head about the different ways I could try and give my style and sound a 'boost' in ways I can't currently do, and all of those ideas require purchasing (or renting) expensive equipment. I currently use the Guitar Rig 5 amp simulator for my guitar processing needs, but it also has some pretty significant shortfalls in many of its more exciting pedal effects - most of which I would want to use in a Jamie P cover if they worked the right way.
One of those problematic pedal effects GR5 has is its octave pedal. Octave pedals can take the sound of your guitar and add notes one or two octaves up or down, or even add fifths or thirds in some cases. The "Octaver" in GR5 is flawed at best with terrible tracking, which creates a warbling effect that isn't desirable for the sound I'd want to use. Getting the sound I want would require the accuracy only a real effect pedal could manage, and the one octave pedal that really caught my eye is the BOSS OC-5 Octave pedal, best demonstrated by Rebea Massaad at the timecoded link here (or the timecoded embed below).
The tracking for the octave effects are extremely precise compared to the very inaccurate and warbly GR5 Octaver effect. The adjustments that can be made to the sound of the effects on the OC-5 are also incredible, providing a lot of versatility in the sound and the ability to minimize a muddy sounding output without being too complicated. It can create an incredibly rich, deep sound out of anything you push through the pedal which, to me, feels like the kind of richness and depth I'd want in a Hootwheelz-style Jamie Paige cover. Sitting at around $200 CDN, this pedal is at a pretty good price considering its versatility and precision - but it's still very expensive for a broke ass hoe like me.
Things only get worse as we move into guitars, because any guitar gearhead reading this might have realized that using an octave pedal as intricate as the OC-5 might not be used to its full potential with a bass guitar.
Introducing, the MRG Electric Baritone Ukelele with a mini Humbucker pickup.
Yes, you read that right: an electric baritone ukelele with a fuckin' pickup. Imagine the incredible hard rock sound already demonstrated in that YouTube short linked above, then add the depth and richness from the OC-5 Octave pedal to drop the sound down a full octave, and you got exactly the type of sound I'd be chasing in a Jamie Paige cover. I could easily imagine myself quickly learning how to translate a song like Rot For Clout or Aggrandicize into my own style with that combination of baritone uke and octave pedal. Granted, I could also see myself getting way too carried away with trying to 'djent' with the damn things and causing all sorts of problems for myself in terms of distractions, but still! IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES!
While the BOSS OC-5 pedal is available for rent at a music store somewhat near me, the $700 CDN MRG Baritone Ukelele unfortunately isn't. That means I'd have to put in some extra effort to do my research on Bari Ukes that are actually available there, and figure out if a similar sound is even possible with them. All of the baritone ukeleles I'm seeing unfortunately don't have any pickups, which would drastically change the sound coming into the octave pedal - which, in turn, changes how it sounds coming out of the pedal and through an amplifier. So frustrating!
At the end of the day I'm really just dreaming and there isn't much preventing me from just vastly switching up the structure of any Jamie P song I might cover. Even so, there's some sense that I'm missing out on an opportunity to take an already-amazing song from an incredible album and give it a transformation of epic proportions. There's just something really appealing to me about taking electropop songs about stardom or love or doomscrolling social media, and making it this full-blast, in-your-face, scream-your-head-off headbanger of a track. And given the relative similarity between Jamie's voice and my own, I think I'd probably smash it out in a week if I had that equipment.
Alas, a girl can only dream.