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: