I Fall To Pieces

Description

For this song you'll get the best results with a steel-string acoustic. I'll be using this Martin-Style "VKV" and strumming it with a medium pick. If your pick is too thin you lose some of the "meat" of the tone, and if it gets too thick you get some very brittle treble when you strum. For a part like this, I find a medium pick to be ideal.

I'm using a combination of the built-in Fishman pickup and the overhead mic that I'm also talking through to get the sound that you hear in this video. If you don't have a steel-string acoustic you could also play the parts on a nylon string acoustic or even on an electric with a clean tone, if you make sure to use the neck pickup and a light touch in your right hand.

For the electric guitar I'll be using my telecaster on the bridge pickup and I'll be running that through a modeled version of a Fender Princeton amp with a little bit of reverb added. But any kind of clean guitar tone will do.

I'm also adding a really interesting delay, which is set to have 2-3 repeats and dialed so the timing of the repeats matches a triplet- "1 and a". That adds some nice extra rhythmic elements to the fills we're going to play.

Some pedals have a tap tempo function, where you just tap the quarter notes and then you choose which subdivision you want for the repeats. On others you'll have to actually tap the triplet, and if there's no tap tempo function at all you'll just have to adjust the delay time until you hit the right rhythm.

But don't worry if you don't have a delay pedal- the parts will sound great anyway. As always, the most important thing is to learn the parts and play them well. And if you do that I'm confident they'll sound good with almost any guitar tone!