The piece that I chose for this initial assessment is a guitar and bass cover of Plug in Baby by Muse. I chose to do this piece because of the challenging riff. I started learning this song during my early days of learning guitar which was 2 years ago before I started college. (Yes it took me 2 years to learn this song).
The most successful part was getting the tone of the guitar and bass. I used my zoom G3x pedal and my Laney HCR 50 amp to get the guitar tone. I look at many guitar forums to find out what pedals Matt Bellamy uses and most people say he uses a fuzz factory with phaser and a digitec whammy. I used all that information to make my own version using the built-in pedals in my Zoom G3x. In the first slot I have a noise gate because I don’t want any buzzing noise coming from my guitar, in the second slot I used a compression/phaser, in the third slot I used a big muff for the fuzz tone, in the fourth slot I have a high gain 3 channel amp sim, in the fifth slot I used a reverb and in the final slot I used a tape echo this effect changes the pitch of the echos. The settings on my Laney amp are Volume 3, Bass 6, middle 6 and treble 6.
For my bass tone I found out Chris Wolstenholme uses a distortion pedal and a bass micro synth. I got this information from Danny Sapko.
I tried to get the bass tone but I was unable because I don’t have a micro synth pedal to use on bass, so I used my BlackStar LT Metal Pedal for heavy distortion tone with my Washburn BAD DOG 30W bass amp.
In the future I would like to improve on my timing because when I watched back me playing guitar for this piece I noticed that I missed some notes and it felt like I rushed through this part of the riff.
To improve I will need to practice playing to a click with the right BPM for the song.