Phil Haymes

Giant Enemy Pyramid (GEP) is currently the intro track to the album and sits at around the 2 to 3 minute length. The name is about as ridiculous as it gets so don’t try to find meaning in it, I merely got a load of cool words then picked 3 at random and this is what came out. Although that being said, the scale and tuning that I’m using doesn’t sound a little mysterious so it fits quite nicely. At one point I even considered renaming the title of the album to this as it’s clearly such an awesome name!

Song Breakdown

The first thing of note on this track is the tuning of the guitar which is a little odd. I decided to down tune an entire step and then drop the top and bottom strings to C so what you end up with is C G C F A C

I added a Digitech Whammy pedal to thicken up the sound using the octave/+ octave mix setting which gives it a really unique sounding tone that sits somewhere between guitar and sitar! I liked the sound so much that I used it also on the lead parts too.

The song came about after stumbling across the intro notes completely by accident and then just playing them over and over again. I was hooked. So what ended up happening was that I decided to have that being played throughout the entire song with other things happening around it. At one point the intro was roughly 2 minutes of clean guitar solo over this repeating riff before any of the other parts came in. I’m still debating whether or not to include this in the final song.

Towards the end of the song I’ve added a synth melody that finishes everything of and closes out. At first I was a little concerned about doing this but the results I’m hearing tell me I’m doing the right thing.

Here’s a quick MP3 of the intro

Giant Enemy Pyramid Intro

*UPDATE*

Okay after several complaints about having such a short MP3 and requests for more of the song, I’ve gone and recorded a full length video of me playing the song for you all. Please bear in mind that this is a very early demo version of the song and as such many things are rough especially the lead guitar part which I’m still writing (so several areas I’m just noodling over in key). This particular version has a slightly different structure to the one I’m currently working on and lacks the synth solo at the end.

So here it is – enjoy! (And please feel free to leave comments or email me with your thoughts! philhaymes@hotmail.com)