King Diamond - Victimized Guitar Cover

Howdy out there in guitar land. Yes, I fat-fingered Thank to "Thanl", but I'm more pissed I missed the start of a rhythm in one spot BOTH TIMES! And played a G harmonic instead of an F# during Pete's lead... call it a senior moment. That out of the way, let's chat.

I'm a day late this week on just about everything. I should have recorded and released this yesterday, Halloween, but family always comes first, and so does trying to figure out the quirks and features of these pesky guitar solos by Pete Blakk. Don't get me wrong, Andy's really aren't easy to do at all, in fact I'm kinda killing myself over a mistake I made during his, but Pete's are harder to figure out for two reasons. One is that he's a substantially more random player - that is he is more feel-based. If you watch clips of him play stuff like this live, he does not play what's on the record completely. He touches some of the right spots but seems to improvise in a similar fashion as opposed to his counterpart. And two, Pete black really likes to play in non guitar centric keys. That is to say, a lot of his solos seem to be centered around A-flat minor or B-flat minor. They're uncommon keys to guitar players because they're not really compatible with open strings. Most guitarists don't use them. Thanks Pete.

Now for the history/impact stuff. I picked this up in 1990 although it'd already been out for a bit. Conspiracy has within it my all-time favorite guitar tones. And I mean of all time. To this day I'm still trying to capture some of the spirit of Andy's lead tones on visit from the dead (the clarity, specific EQ frequency, and power), or Pete Blakk's general juiciness. The rhythm tones on this were quite seriously the foundation of most of my personal tones. In the liner notes of the album they say that they're using PJ Marx pickups and Metaltronix amps. So naturally I've been chasing those too and that tone for years. As you can hear on this recording I'm getting closer, but I've never quite been able to capture it except I have gotten damn close using the amp and cabinet setup I've got in my living room. I think it helps that I built the cabinet specifically to try to get those sounds... A lot of it's in your speakers, you know. But here's the secret, the rest of it is in your hands.