Rocks or Sucks?

good guitar work, personally I like less effects on the guitars. Sound like you have some good rhythm guitars too but lost in the mix. Overall very nice job

Thanks Gerard. I went a little nutty with the delay and such. I go back and forth with very dry guitars sometimes then I go all 80s and do stuff like this. No middle ground here! =]

I hear ya. That is really all down to personal taste. I like straight up guitar sounds but yet I also love Eric Johnson, Steve Vai and John Petrucci and they tend to use a lot of effects too. Either way great playing and post more

BTW what are you playing these days? I stick with my '88 Les Paul and straight class A tube amps most times. I also play with the new Line6 pocket pod which is fun.

I'm pretty impressed.

awesome! you're good Mark!

I run a PRS through Guitar Rig 2 on most of this song. The middle solo is my VG-8... remember those?

I'm looking into getting the Line 6 Vetta II. I love that whole modeling thing and that new software that lets you change guitar models. I'm the biggest gear geek! =]

Thanks man. Thanks to Danny too.

Honest opinion:

As a instrumental track it is not very good. There is not enough going on and sounds like it need vocals. When I hear an instrumental track I want it to tell me something or take me on a journey like a symphony would...this does not. With vocals it could be a completely different story. For a benchmark of what you should strive for as an instrumental rock track listen to Orion.

Bass...recording of the bass track is not good and in places is off. The tone sounds bad to me and it is about as basic as you can get on the bass which is not what I want to hear. If you get a direct box and an active bass (rent one if you don't have one) you can clean up the tone a lot which will allow you to bring the bass further up in the mix. Doing this will make the sound more full and also compliment the rhythm guitar. That said, I am listening on computer speaker made by dell, so I could be missing a lot of the low end here (if so I apologize).

Drums...sound good to me. Whoever recorded this did an especially good job recording the snare.

Lead...sounds good to me. Not my favorite tone, but it is the standard shredding tone and it seems that is what you are going for...so it gets a passing grade. Solos sound tight and well thought out as well.

Interesting that you are using a PRS to get such high tones. I am used to hearing those produce nice rich low tones through mesas. But I guess that is the effects and not the guitar as much.

You should be a reviewer at garage band! =] Nice work.

This whole song (and hence the name) came together as a test of the EZ Drummer software (http://www.toontrack.com/) and so really I just through together a drum track and jammed over it. To hear something that is more fitting with what I usually do on an instrumental see: http://www.marktiarra.com/music/mark...antasclaws.mp3

I generally like to do more with the composition as I am a big fan of guys like Scott Henderson, Mike Stern and Joe Satriani. On a lot of this track I am using the out of phase pickup selection, which rarely gets used by PRS guys.

The bass is actually a little heavier on this than I usually do and I master on a spectragraph too to make sure I'm getting even response across the EQ bands. You might want to pop it on something else to hear and see if it comes out. Even with the spectragraph I still find that getting a consistent mix across platforms hasn't happened consistently for me yet.

Again, thanks for the detailed comments.

good song

the first one was actually pretty cool for something you just threw together. The 2nd one is pretty rockin'.

Thanks dude. It's fun to do those sometimes instead of working out every little detail. It's like a jam session... except it was only me so I guess that makes it musical masturbation.

ah well.. you're a much better guitarist than me, that's for damn sure. haha