Dreamchasers

Dreamchasers, that is what we are, we musician nerds that always fail to manifest in sound what we keep hearing inside. And we try again, and again, and again... We never reach our goals, but keep searching because the journey is magical and totally worthwhile! In this piece, I play the Tenor Sax and the Soprano Sax with three different guitars. For two of the guitars, I use interactive effects, ie sound-design processing that you play simultaneously with the instrument. First, the white Stratocaster could do all that background feedback screaming due to a certain pedal, the DigiTech FreqOut. Then the 8-stringed guitar was played through a couple of delay units where I controlled the "tape loop return level" with an expression pedal, ie allowing me to freeze chunks of audio and have it bouncing around. I aimed at playing just the first bar of fingerpicking, and freeze it until the next chord comes around. The bouncing pad-like sound sometimes came to drag or speed a bit towards the song tempo, which I actually liked and kept like that. Generally, there is a lot of improvisations and first-takes here. For example, I had planned to play the Soprano Sax to simply double up the Tenor Sax melody one octave higher, but as I was recording I got the feeling that "hey, this may turn out a bit boring" so I started to improvise different counter-melodies in the hope of getting some fresh vibes into the music. Luckily it worked. :-) Funny that the parts I like the most were not composed, they just happened.