The Old Stone Gate from Paint With Sound (Jimmy Bear Pearson)

The Old Stone Gate is a peaceful trio. The fretless Fender Jazz bass adds some nice smoothness to the underpinnings of the piece. This was a nice, sit-down-and-record-it-in-one-session tune.

The story of the tune tells about standing near the beautiful stone structure of the gate - looking in towards the part at mountains, crisp air, and blue skies with puffy white clouds. It was an inspirational moment. The entire family had just walked by resident deer standing nearby (unconcerned about our presence, even unconcerned about the car I was in).

Although the piece is a trio, four instruments were used to create the sound: Polar the white Fretless Fender Jazz, Mountain the cedar-topped Takamine GS330s for the later center channel guitar, Buffalo the Ibanez Exotic Wood guitar for the right-side color guitar, and finally the Applause Ovation for the left-side melody guitar at the beginning of the piece. The acoustics were mic'd with a dynamic Shure SM57 at extremely close range (so the kids weren't in the recording as they ran through the house! :-)). The Jazz bass was recorded directly into the piece through the M-Audio MobilePre with no pre-amp.

The inspiration for The Old Stone Gate was the result of a short trip to the far north entrance to Yellowstone National park.

(The excellent stone gate image is copied from user "yunner" in Wikipedia.org page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yellowstone_North_Gate.jpg)