New Sounds…
There’s a new toy arrived in the Jazzient cupboard!
When we play live, we aim to create a crisp, quality sound and also to play everything you hear on the stage. An exception to this is having a drum-machine that we’re kind of apologetic about since we both come from a band that had a drummer Tom [Shadow Factory] and great drums are an aspect we enjoy very much. A lot of our music is rhythm driven and having powerful drum sounds as a foundation can really make some music rock out.
Bev often adds percussion to tracks played live and because we use looping methods this can have a few sound issues; whilst she is recording a section of shakers for example, the microphone will also pick up the sounds outside of her instrument causing ‘bleed’ that ends up being part of the loop. This can make a song messy with unwanted sounds becoming part of a piece of music.
A solution has been found with the amazing Roland Handsonic 20.
This instrument has been ridiculously fun and were working on the ways to incorporate it into our live set. One of the great things is just how natural it sounds and without outside sounds bleeding into a microphone, it’s going to make us sound better on stage too. It doesn’t mean our drum-machine is redundant (neither of us are good enough to replicate the complex beats we have on it!) but it does allow for some terrific embellishment and many beats are quite simple so it will be good to be able to create those live.
Playing with the sounds has also been inspirational and we’ve always loved the sound of the hang drum so having one inside this machine just had to be played with. It also generated a song from a jamming session. We decided to switch on the recorder and a new song appeared as if by magic – This is it:
Secrets of how it’s done!
The tagline on our website and promo materials boast ‘electronics’ as part of the mix so now having acquired a new floor pedal, seems an appropriate time to explain what that actually means…
We are very keen to perform our songs live as fully as possible and a major aspect of this is looping which plays a big part in the arrangements for Jazzient. Our music usually features multiple parts and previously we have used two separate 3 phrase loopers, the excellent Boss RC-300s.
We have one each and these are tethered together with a midi cable to keep them in time with each other.
But now, after a long wait, we have received the very latest unit from Boss – the RC-600 and it is set to help us expand our live abilities much (much) further. Now, we don’t need two separate units because this has six phrases! It can also separate our instruments into their own channels and the sound quality of the machine has leaped up into gorgeous full clarity too.
(Nerd alert – this is the technical stuff)
The RC-600 is a simply amazing machine with seemingly limitless possibilities. I have been getting to grips with programming some of our songs into it. This might sound strange because there’s no music being recorded at this stage. What happens here is defining things like the time signatures and which loop will do what funky things they need to do in the song.
For example our song ‘The Seashell Waltz’ is in 3/4 time and the first thing to record after a shaker (2 bars on loop 4) is a guitar fingerpicking part in 8 bars- so loop 1 is setup accordingly. The 2nd thing is a C# bass pulse which only needs 2 bars on loop 2 for speed. Bev plays the lead Sax and the song is underway with the main theme. After some floating soprano sax soloing comes a choral voice part – loop number 3 has 4 bars and vocal harmonies are layered over each other. Once in place a slicing effect cuts the vocals up into crotchets and Bev loops a unison sax note onto loop number 6 which then get sliced into semi-quavers making the rhythms bounce off each other. Loop 1 is shut off and gracefully fades out – then come some free soloing and huge pad guitar sounds using the guitar synthesizer. Finally these crazy parts fade out and we’re back to the original guitar arpeggio and play out with the simple theme.
Setting up the new Boss RC-600 has been quite a learning curve and there’s plenty more to get to grips with but I have to congratulate the manufacturers on creating such an impressive device that underneath its pretty exterior is a very powerful monster!
Now it’s back to the manuals and the wonderfully helpful musicians on FaceBook and get all our other songs organised.