Steve Morse, voted Overall Best Guitarist in the 1982 and '83 Guitar Player Readers Polls, made his first commercially available album with the Dixie Dregs in 1977. Shortening its name to the Dregs, the group released six LPs before disbanding in 1983. Steve and former Dregs drummer Rod Morgenstein then recruited bassist Jerry Peek to form the Steve Morse Band and to record The Introduction [Elektra Musician, 60369-1-E]. An extension of the Dregs sound with a more guitaristic slant, the project features chicken picker extraordinaire Albert Lee on "General Lee "and former Dregs keyboardist T Lavitz on "Mountain Waltz." The title track is presented as this month's Soundpage; a transcription of the guitar solo appears on page 22. In the following story, Steve guides you on a cut-by-cut tour through the rest of the LP.

Working with a trio instead of a quartet or quintet is a lot more work and responsibility. While this is true when making a record, it's even more evident onstage. In a way, it feels like I'm walking out in public naked-not that I know what that feels like, but I can imagine! Everything you've got or don't have is visible. At first glance, it might seem like a bad way to do it, but I really like it because it puts me exactly in touch with what I'm doing wrong or right. There's no danger of me just getting by on a night without knowing every single thing that I did wrong. Plus, knowing that the audience can hear everything makes you try that much harder to get the clean attack or whatever-just try to get it right.

Being in a trio gives our bassist the freedom to use all kinds of different techniques. To tell the truth, it would be hard to do it as well without someone like Jerry, who is always looking for new ways to play a part that will fill it out more. He's amazingly in tune with what you want. He intuitively comes up with a great way to do something. For me, it's just a matter of maybe suggesting this or that, and that's all. He's a lucky find. He understands music and can play guitar and piano. He's like Rod, who's a piano player who happens to be great on drums. It's great working with people who have good ears and good melodic sense and who can handle the job. The key thing is to make sure they have enough freedom to not get bored.

The Introduction was recorded differently than any of the Dregs albums. We started by using a click track on quite a few tunes. It's my feeling that with fewer people playing, there's more of a tendency for the tempo to change-there's less of an average. And when you're overdubbing, you hear a part enough times to really get sick of it if it's out of time. It was a challenge for Rod, because it's not so easy to play relaxed over a click track.

We recorded the drums first at Eddy Offord Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. The drums were onstage in a gigantic, cavernous theater, which allows you to mike them close and then pick out how many feet away you want the ambient mikes-20'? 200'? [Laughs.] We actually did the album before there was any kind of a record deal, and Eddy's is kind of busy. So, at that stage it was not really wise to go into a high-price studio and put in a lot of hours. We happened to luck across a deal at Morrisound Studios in Tampa, Florida, with some people I respect very much. I liked their attitude about work, and especially the way they put their studio together. We were able to record the rest of the album down there on a much tighter budget. There are cheap studios everywhere, but there's no telling what they've got. Just about everything has to be right, because let's face it: You're going to use everything that's there-the compressor, every channel of the board if you're working on 24-track tape. Every outboard device, practically, is going to get tried, so it's just amazing how right a studio has to be to even be workable.

While Rod was recording, I played with my live rig in a separate room at Eddy's, so I had a sound fairly close to what I was going to have on the record. Whenever possible, I would go ahead and play a solo, too. We tried to duplicate the sound as best we could without overdubbing. Jerry played at the same time the drums did. But once in Tampa, we went back and redid the bass on all but two songs to get more highs. You pretty much have to guess on your bass sound. Each overdub masks a certain bass frequency, unless you have it mixed the loudest, which it's usually not. To get the best sound, you have to be a mind reader and say, "What's going to be on top of this, how is it going to be masked, and what frequencies will I accentuate?" The sound that we guessed on at Eddy's was a little too woofy, and it was only suitable for part of "Huron River Blues" and "The Introduction."

Once in Tampa, we went back and redid the bass with a lot more high end, and spread it out over two or three tracks. Jerry went full-range direct, as well as amped through my Ampeg SVT or modified Ampeg V-4. The amp was mostly for the highs-the bass was trimmed off, and it was turned up loud enough to get a little bit of distortion. Now that tiny bit of distortion and the air coming from the speaker to the microphones gives a sort of cushion around the sound. It gives it so many different reflective harmonics that it makes it stand out in almost any mix and adds the cutting edge. Because we weren't recording much bass from the amp, we didn't have to worry about standing-wave reflections or this or that; it was just a matter of miking it like a guitar from about 18" away. Once you trim the bass down on Ampegs, they do not have the really sharp peaks that some other amps do, especially on the upper end. They're very smooth on the top. We also tried some weird miking techniques, such as bouncing sound off of reflective plywood boards to try to get some different ambience sounds.

There's some pretty prevalent guitar doubling on The Introduction, but sometimes the overdub isn't as loud as the initial part. Doubling makes the part cut a little better, and if you have a perfect double in stereo, it's warmer. We always shoot for the perfect double, and then in the mix we can choose one, both, or one louder than the other. If you can't get it exact, it's always best to put one behind the other. You pick the main one, and put the double way behind it. It doesn't take much to add that little bit of excitement. For me, it's important to double a part immediately after you've played it. Don't wait until the next day. You've got the sound, the tuning, the feel, the phrasing do it then.

If you double, set up a system where you can go from one track to another with a punch of a button. Patch into both channels, and then just switch between them. I'd say, "Alright, let's do it up to this section. " We'd do it, and then our engineer, Chuck Allen, would say, "Again?" And I'd say, "No, switch tracks." If I thought I did it better on the second track, I'd go back to track one and redo that. And then we'd listen to how they corresponded, because a lot of times I can get an exact double by not listening to the other one. On certain things where I've ad-libbed- say, I've slid off a note slowly down the fingerboard-I might want to listen to it while I'm doing the overdub.

A lot of the doubling I did was with keyboards. For instance, the melody on "Cruise Missile"-to me, the way it's mixed sounds like a guitar. But to get sort of a violinish, slightly ambiguous sound, I doubled it with the bends and everything on a Minimoog keyboard synthesizer. Then I pulled the Minimoog track behind the guitar in the mix. With guitar doubling, the bends are pretty exact. But when you double with a different instrument where the bends are not exactly perfect, you get that different kind of aural excitement. It seems to have the effect of sounding like a string. I used that technique on quite a few things.

Jerry played harmonics in his bass solo in "Cruise Missile. "At first, he was just going to play over one note, and I suggested we have a moving diatonic progression underneath it. So we made the track with him doing chords that fell easily to his fingers and consisted of two or three notes of harmonics and a bass note. The next step was doing a solo over that. Whenever Jerry does harmonics, it sounds nice to do them on the guitar, too. They're in the same position, only an octave higher. To add a little bit of sparkle to that, way lightly in the background I put some half-speed guitars that were doing the same thing again. I slowed the tape down-the original guitar sounds like a bass when you're doing this-and played the harmonics again, very slowly. At regular speed, these come out two octaves higher than the bass harmonics. At the end of his solo, Jerry fingertapped two lines. I thought that we should have something different the second time, so I added a harmony to that. I hate doing the same thing twice without anything being different.

At the end of "Cruise Missile, " there's a little guitar orchestra that comes in doing chords. This is eight guitar tracks doing four parts-the chords in half-notes. There are two half-notes and a whole-note every two bars outlining the chords that the fast line is going through. The high melody comes on top of that, and there's a harmony added to that. In terms of tracks, there's 12 or 14 guitars going. But in terms of lines, there's the low line with the bass, the melody, the melody harmony, and the "Mighty Mouse" guitars-that's what I call the eight guitars doing the chords. These are way in the background, and they sound like Mighty Mouse for some reason. I admit it was overdone; I was going for the bombastic ending [laughs].

And people say, "You have a trio. What'd you do the album in-one day?" It's hard to explain that just those tiny little details, like adding the sparkle to those harmonics, can consume a day or two of experimentation. Those Autoharp-sounding chords in "Cruise Missile"-the Pat Metheny kind of crashes-were done the same way, using a 12-string guitar and all the Ovation guitars I had, trying different ways. Finally I settled on a mix of regular electric-just like I play live-and acoustic 6-string and halfspeed acoustic 6-string. Each of these tracks was treated separately with the Lexicons [PCM41s] to give them a little bit of shimmer. I spent a lot of time on those chords. "Cruise Missile" alone took at least 50 hours. You could get it to sound almost the same in five hours, but I would rather spend that extra time just to get something that really excited me. Let's face it: If you don't like your albums, who else is going to?

I wrote "General Lee" after playing with Albert Lee at a trade show. I was so impressed by his good, simple feeling for rock and roll. I love everything I've ever heard him play. He's a very solid, well-phrased guitarist with an impeccable sense of timing. Other than that, he's just a normal guy [laughs]. In fact, he didn't even hear the song until we walked into the studio. It has a very simple foundation, and I had already done the basic tracks and melody before I flew to California to record his solos. It starts in A, and all the stuff up to the solos is mine.

Albert takes the first and third solos-the ones in G-using his thin but full Telecaster sound with a lot of high end. In fact, we had to trim some of his high end because my guitar was sounding like a bass next to his. I do the second and fourth solos in D. I played my first solo with my thumb and 2nd finger plucking the strings, trying to get a little bit of the sound Albert gets naturally. My last solo was done with a pick and a little bit more distortion. We had about four tracks to work with and just kept putting solos down. There was one solo of Albert's that I really liked, but he liked the ending of another one better. When I mixed the album back in Atlanta, I found a great spot to switch in the ending that he liked better, so you can't hear the splice at all. But Albert is one of those legendary one-take studio players. Everything he did could have been on the record.

What inspired "V.H.F. (Vertical Hair Factor)"? MTV-what else [laughs]? I played the piano and organ all the way through it, and a lot of guitars. The first melody has guitars in fifths. Live, I do the melody in fifths that are played together. But on the record, I separated each note. If, say, the first note of the melody is a C on the first string, and an F below that on the second string-that's a fifth in 6th position. Okay, if you hit that with your amp and some distortion and add a little echo, it'll sound fine for live, but the two notes are interfering with each other a little bit. Next to a perfect octave, which is very hard to get on a guitar, a fifth is one of the best intervals to play if you're going to use distortion. It produces the least amount of discordant overtones. But if you separate them-play one note on one track and one on the other-you get a little bit of air around each note. This makes it sound smoother, gives it a more violin-like quality. So every note of the melody is separated into at least two parts so there's no overtone interference through the amp. To get a longer sustain, I used a TC Electronic box that has a booster, sustain, and equalizer.

The Baroque-sounding lick in "V.H.F." was done on an Ovation acoustic and clean direct electric guitar. The first solo, which is real high and super-distorted, was done with a DiMarzio guitar with a vibrato arm; this is a blue copy of my regular guitar with all the pickups. [Ed. Note: Steve's main guitar combines an old Fender Stratocaster neck with a Telecaster body, and has five pickups: a Gibson humbucker, a stock Fender Strat unit, a cylindrical Fender Telecaster rhythm model, a DiMarzio-modifed custom Fender humbucker, and a 360 Systems hex pickup. For more details, see the August, 1982 issue.] It has a heavier body and a solid metal bridge, which gives it a little different sound. Originally, Allan Holdsworth was going to play on that song. He couldn't make it, so to have it sound like a different person, I used a different guitar and kept the solo short, because I didn't want to elaborate too much in a style that I didn't know too much about. The next solo was done on my regular guitar. The second time the melody comes in, I've got all the guitars doing fifths with the organ, and below that I'm playing a miked, straight, fat guitar sound. It sounds real big and synthesizer-like because it's playing with the other things.

I use up- and down-strokes all the way through "On The Pipe." The opening riff is easygoing and almost country-sounding. It's in G, and I do one pull-off in that lick. The main theme riff is doubled with the Minimoog synthesizer-it was a pain learning that! In the middle break, we used a lot of midrange on my Ampeg through JBL speakers. For the album, we alternated between Celestions, JBLs, and the old V-4 cabinet. Each speaker makes a big difference in your distortion, as does the way you mike it. For instance, to get a really metallic sound, you might just want to forget about having any ambience. I can't explain what a huge difference it makes to move the microphone one inch to the left or right of the speaker's center-especially on a solo, when you really hear the tone a lot. And sometimes you've got to record a pretty ugly sound in order to have it cut through on a solo. This tune was a case of recording an ugly sound, gritting our teeth, and leaving it until it was all mixed together. We found that it worked really well. By the way, "on the pipe" is an expression dirt-bike riders use to describe when they're in the peak horsepower-the high RPM area-of a two-stroke engine. When people are on the pipe, they're usually movin' on out [laughs].

For "The Whistle," I used a Gibson Chet Atkins electric solidbody nylon-string and an Ovation nylon-string stereo model-the first, third, and fifth strings come through one side, and the others come through the other side. The problem with all the electric-acoustic guitars in the studio is that if you have any high end on there at all, the finger squeaks will drive you nuts if you just use the pickup. That's why it's better to balance the sound with a microphone. In my case, that didn't work real well, because I have a supershallow bowl, and there's not enough sound coming off it to overcome the finger noise acoustically. So I added the Chet Atkins and a little bit of this and that [laughs]-I spent hours getting the right mixture of Lexicon effects that were subtle enough not to cover up the sound. The whole idea was to get some presence and sparkle without that finger noise. We ended up having to kill some high end.

Rod played the synthesizer part in one take while I turned the knobs to change the sound slightly. "The Whistle" has a bombastic section at the end: There are at least eight distorted guitars, four in the harmonics, and a sort of harpsichord-sounding 12-string. These all sneak in, and you don't notice them that much. The idea was to not make anything too obvious, but just make it blend. When you listen to a real orchestra, you don't say, "Wow, that's a nice cello, that one right there, third from the left." It's an entire unit. Something is always moving and changing, but you don't know exactly what unless you really are into instrumentation.

I went direct for "Mountain Waltz," with the studio compressor, an Aphex Aural Exciter-which doesn't do all that much but bring out the high end-and some Lexicon Bear: the PCM-41 digital delay, a Prime Time digital delay, and a 224 digital reverb. We played this song when the Dregs were a four-piece. There's a bass melody where I do harmonics over moving chords. Then to bring out Jerry's melody, I played the Chet Atkins guitar two octaves above with some amp distortion, and used a pick to get a very smooth, nondescript kind of sound. A regular tone would have had too much high end. This way it was a very soft and smooth sound that didn't interfere with the bass and had approximately the same attack characteristics. This was the equivalent of what I would do if I had a violin: I'd get a mellow sound and double it with the bass.

The slow opening theme of "Huron River Blues," which repeats later in the song, was an experiment. When I played it the first time, I wrote out the part and divided all the notes into three categories: A B C, A B C, going down every note. Then I played the first, fourth, and seventh notes-all the A's- on one track and held them longer than I could if I had played the whole line on the same track. Then I played the B's-the second, fifth, and eighth notes-on another track. Then I played the third set of notes on another track. This made the notes overlap: The previous note was still ringing when I picked the next one, and they lay on top of each other. Then I doubled all that, just to get a little bit of an effect and make it smoother. The end of that section is followed by bass harmonics. For the guitar harmonics after that, I played a direct, clean guitar through the studio compressor.

I used my regular guitar sound through the amp for the next section. Before I hit every note, I turned the tone control all the way to bass, struck the note, and twisted the tone control to treble. The next time I played the slow theme that opens the piece, I used a wah-wah pedal and a lot of distortion with the Twiggs guitar. [Ed. Note: Once owned by Daune Allman, this Gibson Les Paul later belonged to the late Twiggs Lyndon, road manager for the Dixie Dregs.] From then on out, it's Twiggs' guitar. The blues shuffle was played through a wah-wah, and the inspiration for the tone was Jeff Beck's "I Ain't Superstitious" [from Truth, Epic, PE26413]. The wah-wah sound with a little bit of delay is real catchy.

My role as producer of The Introduction entailed driving, waiting, worrying [laughs]. Actually, my role was to have a plan. It even came down to things like scheduling the instruments and the overdubs, arranging the playing itself, the music, the instrumentation, the track layout. You have to be very aware of the track layout with the way I use 24 track's-with four tracks for a little tiny sound that no one's going to hear. You have to watch tracks from the very beginning. Overall, the time it took to record the album would be in the 300+ hours, and I'm happy with the way it turned out.

I have to make compensations for playing this music onstage, but it's not as bad as you may think. There's a tendency to always wonder, "Well, how are we going to do this?" But we always find a way. For "V. H. F. " we have to use a tape of the drums while Rod plays keyboards onstage. We also have a tape with the overdubbed guitars on "The Whistle, " and I just play along with a time track that no one else can hear, hopefully because it just comes through the monitors. I have a little 4-track Teac cassette and can assign left-to-right outputs for each of the tracks-turn it to just the monitors or to out front. Playing onstage with a tape is weird but if we only do it for one or two songs, I don't think it's a bad thing. Besides, it helps get the song across.

Transcribed by John D. Smith