Ten Years Gone: The Inspiration & Proof Of Concept Treatment

The Fragment

For every guitar player there are little licks or riffs or guitar figures that we find ourself playing whenever we pick up a guitar. These little song fragments or idioms become part of our vocabulary as players and we find ourselves playing them at home as part of a warm-up or practice routine, and in music stores or anywhere we might be trying out a new guitar. There’s a little segment in Ten Years Gone that I just adore for it’s beauty and simplicity, and over the year it has worked its way into my personal routine. Here’s the segment.

(And in case we ever lose Soundcloud we’ve uploaded it to the site as well)

Can We Record This?

After the completion of the Original Stairway Project I didn’t immediately think about a follow up.  Stairway took over a year to complete and had inspired several other original music projects that were occupying our time. But that little fragment kept finding it’s way into my playing and eventually got us all thinking: Could we record this next? Recording any Zeppelin track is daunting – but this one? It’s not like it’s The Rover or The Ocean – It’s Ten Years Gone with reportedly 14 different guitar tracks! I was pretty sure I could reach out for vocals again (Michelle Payne did an amazing job on Stairway). Drums were going to be an issue so I was going to need help on those, or at least find a score, but the song itself – with so much going on, yet with such delicate and intricate beauty…. could it be done?

The only way to know for sure would be to work up a treatment. I did some deep diving on the guitar parts and decided the solo section was probably the make or break part of the arrangement. If I could lay down a treatment that sounded half-way decent there, then I’d commit to tackling the song in earnest. It took some time, but after many starts and stops, and months of delay while researching and programming the drum parts, I think we arrived at a rough treatment that on it’s own gave us the confidence to say — Yes – We Can Do This!

We present that initial treatment here for you now – it was after doing this work-up that we committed to recording the song. Everything you hear here is just a scratch track so it’s all pretty rough, but it’s pretty close as far as note for note goes (but we can certainly get it better and tighter, and way more polished.) The project won’t use any of these tracks but we’ll definitely use them as a guide while the song gets sketched out and constructed in the DAW.

The Initial Rough Work-Up Of The Solo Section

(and again below in case we lose Soundcloud one day)

Feature Image Credit: Go! by Philipp Zieger, via flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0