… with some of the sounds we used a bunch on the h&s record. I’ve noticed this week as I’ve been able to step back and listen to the whole thing, not focusing on crossing off the last to-do items for each individual song.
Some of these are:
- Bass fuzz! I don’t mean a little color or grind; I mean full-on fuzz to take song sections over the top
- Hammond. Unfortunately this had to be done with a plugin – for all our gear, we don’t have a six-thousand-dollar organ and rotary speaker cabinet lying around – but it’s a very good-sounding one and it shows up in a lot of tunes
- Winds (beyond sax and flute); trumpet, clarinet, and bass clarinet add a lot to one song in particular. Hearing what Scottie did with the clarinets whet my appetite for more of that
- Guitar feedback, for transitions, live-in-the-studio leave-it-in vibes, and in one case as a massive, many-voiced choir of soft-ish feedback
- Analog synthesizer including Korg MS-20, Akai AX-60, and Korg Volca Bass. The polyphonic AX-60 was the workhorse here, for pads and arpeggios; the others make special guest appearances
- Guitar modulation effects; phaser, flanger, and filter (with modulated cutoff frequency). Sometimes these are used conventionally, sometimes… not
All in all we’re probably just short of pocket symphony / “lush” territory, but squarely in full-band, kitchen-sink mode. In other words, remember the end of “Blues or Astroblue?”
Almost every song gets there :)