This was FUN!!! I haven't done surf in forever. In the mid-90's I had a surf-rock band with my brother called the Mystery Men. We had a good time. This reminded me of those days....
I used my gold S2 Standard with GF Surf 90s. For the amp I used my Line 6 Helix rack on a Vox AC15 model. All I did was take and bump the drive a bit and put a '63 Spring Reverb between the amp and cab. Instant surf goodness!!! Back in the Mystery Men days I used a real Fender spring reverb tank with a blackface Tremolux and a P90 equipped Hamer Special - GREAT rig, even if it didn't look traditional, lol.
I approached each section separately like it's own 'chapter' in the epic tale of taking a mega ride on a sweet wave under the moonlight. Corny, but often when I am playing instrumental music I need a "theme" in order to develop melodic content.
I recorded my Helix into a channel of my analog console, which takes a bus channel and feeds a Focusrite Sapphire Pro 40. My DAW is ProTools 12. In PT I loaded the backing tracking and processed it with an RS56 EQ plug-in to give it a bit of sparkle. I also ran a parallel compression track using am 1176 Limiter. I tend to do that a lot - I like how it keeps things "fat" with sacrificing clarity. The guitars were bussed and treated with an SSL4000 channel. They were also sent to the parallel compression channel. I ran a separate parallel reverb Aux to give a little more depth to the track. This was blended in very lightly. I used the Abbey Roads Plate Reverb plug-in from Waves. I just pulled up a preset from the "strings" menu. Last bit of post-processing was done on the master bus. Here I inserted the Lurssen Mastering plug-in from IK Multimedia. I used an "Americana" preset, tweaked a little to fine tune what I wanted to hear, and DONE!!
Here's my take. Hope you enjoy as much as I did making it!!! Of to do the other months!!!!
https://soundcloud.com/mdenman/late-night-ride
the guitar I used: