The Gemo Ensemble

If you are interested in watching the videos, here's a link to "a visual mixtape" of the entire Video Music album: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iH3oGKviEg With this piece, I'm trying to make music with an open sound and a dynamic interplay between the instruments. The method was to not over-compose the music but rather rely on first-take recordings where I focus on playing in a commenting way along with the previously recorded instruments (or performances yet to be recorded, that I initially only "heard" in my head). The first recording/video was the acoustic guitar. The featured four string instruments are among my favorites. The Telecaster has Danny Gatton Pickups from Joe Barden, a sound I really like. You may have noticed that the neck head is "reversed" on my tele? That's intentional, I like the effect it has on the sound due to the special string tension. When it comes to Fender style guitars I like to assemble my own from spare parts, and I always go for a lefty neck and a nut that lets strings glide smoothly to stay in tune. At the moment I have two strats and one tele like this. The Fender Acoustasonic is my go-to guitar for acoustic type sounds by line-in recording. The *strandberg Boden 8 was used for bass lines in this video. All guitars were performed through my Universal Audio Apollo Twin USB, loaded with Unisone software ("hybrid" technology bridging analog and digital). But the Electric Cello was played through a Fractal Audio Axe-fx II because that's the best electric cello sound I have come about. The Axe-fx let me set the bow pressure (input amplitude envelope) to control the preamp gain to make the cello more expressive to play.