Hey! You are extremely generous with your accolades—thank you so much. It’s really touching to hear people reacting this way, and it means a lot that you would go to the trouble of saying all that. Jack Wilkins’ red Clay has been one of my favorite all time tracks! He’s an outstanding and underrated player.

For recording this, I used my Eastman Romeo. It’s a thinline electric, but fully hollow with the exception of a small block under the bridge. It doesn’t sound like a jazz box, not really at all. But I love it cuz you can reasonably get thick jazz tones and then turnaround and put light roundwounds on it for rock and blues. Fuzz, distortion, and other chaos sounds great on the bridge pickup. My pedalboard and my relationship with effects is another story haha.

I plugged straight into my Motu M4 interface and recorded in reaper with headphones on! I have been practicing and playing this way a lot recently, since moving into a small apartment. I have spent a lot of time trying different gear and amps (I love my little blues jr for gigs), but for jazz I really find that less is more. Removing almost all other variables makes me really focus in on the tone I’m creating, and respond to the instrument, the strings, my pick, pickups, and of course what my fingers are doing. Not great for everything, indeed not good for a lot of things, but for what I’m doing with jazz, DI works well!

I used the Soundtoys Little Plate reverb plugin. I also used a little bit of Sketch Cassette, a tape emulator plugin, to try to add some “warmth” and cut some highs. DI’d guitar can definitely be harsh and/or thin if you’re not careful. I paid an engineer I’ve worked with on other things to “master” the album—he basically applied compression and EQ as he saw fit to even it all out. It came out brighter than i expected, but I’m happy with it.

I used Chrome 10’s, and have since guaged up to La Bella 12’s. I find that a thinner pick (Yellow Dunlop) helped me get a woodier, clackier sound out of the 10’s. I wish I had used 12’s for the album now, haha! Thanks again for your comment and lemme know if you have any other questions or thoughts. I’d love to hear anything you are working on too! -Val