Hello and welcome to my blog for week 5. In this weeks blog I’ll cover my groups performance in music tech forum, the research I’ve been doing on guitarist that use MIDI for performing and recording and some products I’ve found information about in the past week.
My group in music tech forum performed a funky jazz type of tune incorporating a moog. The members in my group were Kevin on the Roland electronic drum kit, which produces some unreal sounds, Adam on guitar and moog, Paul on Saxophone and piano and I played guitar. The song was developed by me remembering a staccato rhythm Paul and I wrote in a previous band backing Tasmania. This rhythm was used as the intro, followed by a four bar moog solo by Adam using the phase shifting device on the instrument. This went into a twelve bar funk groove using the chords F9, E9, Eb9, and back to E9 that I came up with. This section had free style Moog improvisation performed by Adam. Then we decided I’d do a 16 bar guitar solo over the groove followed by a 16 bar sax solo because the sax had a much wider dynamic range than my clean guitar sound plugged straight into the desk. After the solo section we reversed the entire intro because it seemed to work really we well, and have a tight ending with the staccato rhythm. I know this might sound like a very amateur and simple, but we only had three one rehearsals to write the piece. Under the circumstances I thought we did a reasonable job. Things I would improve if given the chance to redo the performance. Include more instruments from the studio, provided by the university, for example an analogue synthesiser to outline the chords changes in the solos using the arpeggiator function. I personally think it would be really enjoyable to try and copy the arpeggiator using sweep picking arpeggios on the guitar. I could come up with some interest harmonies starting on different chord tones to the synthesiser. Unfortunately this was not possible because the synthesisers were in use by other groups. My guitar was plugged straight into the desk and I had a really awful clean mid-range sound which was hard to work with. Like most guitarist I’m really fussy with my tone and so I should be because there are so many guitarist today that have appalling tone. This is just my opinion and tone is a very personal thing.
Last week I talked a bit about the Roland GK-2A digital pickup as shown below.
I mentioned I would find out how such guitarists as Jennifer Batten (Michael Jackson, Jeff Beck, solo artist) and John Petrucci (Dream Theatre, Liquid Tension) use MIDI in performing and recording. I failed to find any information on John’s use of MIDI. I’ve heard that he uses MIDI to store his guitar sounds for performing live with Dream Theatre. He does this because he requires so many different types of sounds to recreate his work in the studio. He apparently uses a massive foot controller with about 24 switches, each switch stores all the guitar sounds for each individual song. The guitar tones change automatically through out the song so he doesn’t have to tap dances around pedals all night and can concentrate on the just playing the song. He does this because his parts are so complex. I will try and find more information about this in the future weeks, and see if I can find out what gear he uses to pull this off.
Jennifer Batten on the other hand uses MIDI for performing and recording. In the Jeff Beck band she uses the Roland GK-2A pickup with a Roland GR-33 to play orchestra parts with her guitar. In the studio she has used a Roland GI-10 converter with the Roland 1080 for sounds.
While researching Jennifer Batten I found she was involved with Washburn in creating a signature model guitar the JB-100 MIDI which has a Roland GK-2A pickup and an inbuilt switching unit (Shown below).
I have also found some guitar companies such as Godin, Brian Moore, and Gibson who make a similar product to Jennifer Batten’s signature model I will look into these and hopefully tell you a bit about them next week. If pictures didn't work i'll fix them in the future!
References
Simoes P.J.R. Roland GK2a. April, 04, 2007
www.genocities.com/.../Alley?9516/instr.html
Guitarhoo. (2005) Guitarhoo! Interviews. April, 04, 2007
http://www.guitarhoo.com/interviews/jenniferbatten.shtml
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