Hey Friend,

I dove into my Guitar Tricks account last night to check out the song “You Better You Bet” by the Who. This is one of my favorite Who tunes. 

As I was going through the video lessons, I found that it was recorded with two separate, but very similar, guitar parts.

When you listen to a song passively, you don’t usually realize how many recorded tracks it took to get the finished sound you hear. It’s not until you really listen closely to a recording that the creative layers start to come out of hiding. 

Even though I’ve known about layering tracks for quite a while, I’m still amazed at the inventive ways guitar parts can be created and overlapped to build dense and interesting effects.

Unless you’re thinking about it, multiple guitar parts blend themselves together and give you the impression it’s just one guitar player doing his thing…

You almost have to have insider information to know that what you hear on a recording is more than one guitar - even though the band only has that one guitar player.

Sometimes you can tell because each guitar part has a different sound. It could be driven harder (overdrive effect) or have some other effect influencing the output - think chorus or phase.

For example, many times a guitar track will have a delay effect on it to fatten the sound of the guitar. The delay is so tiny - literally a few milliseconds - that you can’t hear it. But this little tweak manages to beef up the guitar tone.

Or there might be reverb on the track, making it sound like one guitar is closer or further away than the other in the mix of the instruments. It doesn’t have to be much reverb either to make things sound bigger or smaller.

With “You Better You Bet,” both guitar parts have the same amp setup, so the listening is key to hearing the two separated parts. It also helps to know that trying to play the two parts at the same time on one guitar would be impossible.

Just reviewing the lesson gave me a renewed respect for Pete Townsend’s writing ability. I guess I’ve always seen him as the “windmill” king of power chords, with some sus chords mixed in, but there’s a lot of interesting textures in his guitar parts.

Anyway, good stuff! Gotta run, talk to ya tomorrow. 

Peace~

Dave