“That whole thing was just one take, from beginning till the end”: Lenny Kravitz guitarist on his solo in Are You Gonna Go My Way
Lenny Kravitz guitarist Craig Ross reveals that he only had 15 minutes left on the clock in the studio when he came up with the guitar solo on the 1993 smash hit Are You Gonna Go My Way.
Talking to Chris Shiflett on the Shred with Shifty podcast, Ross says Kravitz was buying session time to work on producing two separate records, one for French singer Vanessa Paradis, and one for himself.
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“We had 15 minutes left, and it was time to go,” he remembers [via Guitar World]. “But the amp was set up and the mic was set up and I said, ‘Look, can I go in and just put another part on top real quick?’”
With Ross on the guitar and Kravitz on drums, they had about an hour left on the session when the guitarist improvised the iconic riff that eventually became Are You Gonna Go My Way. The two of them, along with Tony Breit on the bass, started jamming on the idea and after about half an hour the song had been fully cut.
But the solo itself only came to life once they had already recorded the track all the way through, and Ross came up with the idea of quickly adding a new part to it. “That whole thing was just the one take, from beginning till the end,” he reveals, though he didn’t go into it with the intention of playing a full solo at first.
“All I meant to do was the octave,” he says. “So they rolled the tape back, I played that bit, but when it got to that section I said to myself ‘I’ll just play a solo and they can always erase it’. Then, [I] went to the control room, and they were like, ‘That was a cool guitar solo’, and that was it.”
Last year, Lenny Kravitz gave his opinion of Instagram shredders who prioritise speed over feel in their playing. “I think musicians should be thinking more about feel, dynamics and emotion, if you’re thinking about anything at all,” he said.
The post “That whole thing was just one take, from beginning till the end”: Lenny Kravitz guitarist on his solo in Are You Gonna Go My Way appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
