Last month I promised you that we’d get to the final eight bars of the “I Am Legend” intro, so here we go
The six bars that go from 1:29 to 1:40 involve a circular picking pattern and the always-spooky E(b5) tritone chord (see Figure 1). For the final two bars, stomp on your distortion box or channel-switcher and start chugging away on the E5 power chord shown in FIGURE 2.
It seems like we spent a year on that little piece of music. Now we can finally move on to some more of your questions. We’re tight on space this month, so I’m only going to be able to get to one this time. But that vacation I thought I had coming is nowhere in sight: I’ve already gotten way more questions than I thought I would (good ones, too!), so it looks like we’re going to have to keep Astro Ink going for a while!
J., How do you play the rhythm and chorus to “More Human Than Human” and what effects are you using?
– Curt Pazz via the Internet
The tablature for this song has been published a couple of times (in the June ’95 Guitar World and in the Warner Bros. Authentic Guitar-Tab Edition of White Zombie: Astro-Creep: 2000), and the main parts are shown below. There aren’t really any effects on the guitar in this song, just a lot of amps turned up really loud. I’m playing an Ibanez Iceman guitar detuned a minor third (low to high: C# F# B E G# C#), and I use a chrome slide for the main riff (see Figure 3). I prefer metal slides over glass ones because I’m able to get more of a slashing, in-your-face kind of sound with them.
As for those loud amps I was talking about, I played through four different half-stacks at the same time. When you use more than one amp, you can get huge sounds by blending the different tones. To do this, you need some kind of splitter box-I like the four-output one that Mesa-Boogie makes. Anyway, the amps I used are: a Randall solid-state head through a Randall 4×12 cabinet, a Randall head through a Mesa 4×12 cabinet, a Mesa Triple-Rectifier head through a Mesa cab and a Marshall Valvestate head [VS100RH] through a Randall cab. Each speaker cabinet was close miked with a single Shure SM57.
The slide part sounds like it may have an effect on it because it was doubled-i.e. the guitar performance was recorded twice and then those two tracks were panned left and right for a stereo image. To duplicate the thick sound of this part, try using a chorus pedal (in stereo if possible) or a short delay.
Crap, we’re out of space! We’ll cover the outro-chorus riff to “More Human” and answer more of your questions next month.
