Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Best first jam ever!

On March 10, 2014 around 7:30PM Eric, Jamie, and I had a pretty epic jam session. It started out with me and Eric warming up while we waited for Jamie who had been doing business out in Manhattan in the afternoon. I spent the day at Jury duty getting bored out of my mind watching them attempt to select 28 people that didn't have any problems with doing jury duty (everyone has problems with jury duty!). 8 hours of that crap can melt your mind. I assume Eric was writing code all day. But I digress...
  Eric hooked up my Novax CH8 (8-string, fanned fret, electric guitar / bass hybrid) and I sat behind the Traps drumkit and we played for a few minutes.  In retrospect I think the warmup contributed to the awesomeness of the following jam.  I needed the warmup to get used to drumming again, and Eric hooking up the Novax would turn out to be an awesome decision.
  So by the time Jamie showed up we already had a full rhythm section consisting of guitar/bass/drums. Jamie's Ch7 added 2 additional tracks of bass and guitar.
  When you listen to this jam you can hear Jamie's guitar and bass tracks occupying mostly the left side of the stereo field and Eric's bass/guitar/theremin tracks should be mostly on the right. Eric did something interesting and ran the bass side through a RAT distortion pedal which to my ears helps it blend together with his guitar track making a super fat textured sound.
  And finally, to send this track over the top Jamie used his looper pedal to loop his bass and guitar tracks freeing him up to play the drums which allowed me to play saxophone.  He took me by surprise and we clumsily traded places behind the drum kit but I think it just adds to the charm and spontaneity and energy of the piece.
  Well, enough babbling about this. You should listen to it if you haven't already clicked play. Check it out!


Oh, just one more thing. This image below is of a mouthpiece that I have been searching the whole Internet for for a few weeks. It is a vintage Selmer metal soprano saxophone mouthpiece from probably the 1960's.  All I want is something similar. I almost had one but I got cold feet and let myself get outbid on ebay. I ended up getting a cheaper used possibly less vintage model. What makes this mpc so difficult to find is that it has an "F" facing which seems to be rare these days. The ones they sell brand new have an "E" facing. I've also learned to recognize the width of the groove down the side of the mouthpiece. The newer ones have a more narrow groove.  All I know is I played this mouthpiece and decided that I had to have one. Not the most exciting news, well it is to me, but I thought I should post an image with this blog entry so here it is! Optional oohs and aahs...