Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird is a monument to Southern Rock. Its Slide guitar intro is as beautiful as it is memorable. As the tempo is not very fast, it's an excellent exercise in sound quality and accuracy.
Free Bird Slide guitar intro
Recording of a work session from April 15th 2024:
Setup
To record the video above, I use a fairly simple setup: the NUX Mighty Plug Pro is used for amp and effects emulation for the guitar, the iReal Pro app streams the chord sequence over Bluetooth, and a USB-C cable connects it to the MacBook for direct recording in Quicktime.
- Guitar: Gibson SG refin Cherry's Guitars
- Pickups: PAF Alnico4 Tornade MS
- Sound: Mighty Plug Pro NUX
- Slide: The Rock Slide modèle Ariel Posen
- Backing track: iReal Pro
- Recording: Quicktime
The iReal Pro mobile application is a remarkable tool for working. You can quickly program a chord grid and instantly have a virtual band playing it!
Here is the result:
Once the recording was done, in a single take, I just imported the video sequence into Final Cut Pro to add a title, logo and a few subtitles. This step is of course completely optional, just to make it look nicer in YouTube.
Conclusion: you too can record your video to listen to it again and share it with others. Exposing yourself in this way (you don't have to publish your video publicly) is a powerful motivator.
Until the next interview or gear review, keep on playing the guitar!
Pierre Journel.
For more info:
Slide Archives
Gibson Files
