Part 3: The Legend of the Black Shawarma
AF: I am going to play the intro from Poquito Mas.The first 10 seconds you have an acoustic guitar which kind of drops and gets pitch shifted as if you were about to scratch on it. I am interested to know how you make that sound – it gets pitch shifted but not exactly like a pitch shift.
Let’s listen to Poquito Mas Guitar Intro
Eisen: Basically what I do in many things is, I take, let’s say, one note from the guitar part and I just apply an effect on it. This pitch shift if I am not wrong is Soundforge because I hate the pitch shift on Cubase. So I take it to Soundforge just to pitch shift and I paint how low I want the pitch shift to go. It’s really easy on Soundforge to do that. And then I take this part of the wave and bring it back in time, and just put it in this second. If I want a trigger, I just mark a small part, I loop the small trigger, it can be a few samples even. I try to avoid clicks when I’m doing it, looking for zero crossing. Then I just do the trigger and put it in the right time.
AF: What delay do you use? It sounds like a delay with a filter on it, it’s a plug-in?
Eisen: Actually it’s a delay that I made.
AF: I have the Lexicon MPX-1 and it reminds me of one of the effects on it. It’s really nice. To mix a filter on the delay.
Eisen: It’s an 8 tap delay on it, and on each tap there you can add any effect that you want.
AF: On the guitar, just after the intro, you have an amp effect. You said you are not using guitar amps.
Eisen: No. Not at all.
AF: So the effects that you are using…
Eisen: On this specific guitar, it’s basically going to the Avalon clean, and from the Avalon, it actually goes to an LA2A, a real one, a little bit compression. I think for highs, to make the guitar brighter, I use the Pultec UAD plug-in. I love the high frequencies in the Pultec. Usually I just choose the highest settings.
AF: On Sa’eed, the beginning percussion parts, is it your drummer who is playing?
Listen to Sa’eed Percussion Intro
Eisen: The percussion here is actually just tapping on an acoustic guitar.
AF: Really?
Eisen: Yeah with the fingers, just tapping on the body of the guitar and using the same stereo technique that we talked about before. The percussion of the whole thing is using an acoustic guitar, just drumming on the guitar. It sounded pretty cool. We didn’t expect to use it. I don’t know how it sounded like that. We just tried it, and the mic was really close to the tapping, and it sounds like that.
AF: Sometimes you have surprises.
Eisen: Always, the good stuff is by surprise.