This album can be streamed here
The original Axe came out more than a decade ago, and it wasn't my intention to leave it so long before releasing a new album in the same style.
During those years, my style and my pedalboard have developed a lot, and this album illustrates the type of solo guitar pieces I've been playing recently.
There are no overdubs or post-recording effects; these pieces sounded exactly this way in my headphones as I was playing them. The only thing I've done is editing, making individual recordings shorter, then joining 6 of them them together in pairs to make 3 longer pieces.
The Tracks:
Weightless
Guitars: H&S branded Stratocaster-style Twin-neck; Gibson SG Standard
Prominent effect: Meris Polymoon
Carried on the Wind [10:35]:
Guitar: Harley Benton 8 string
Prominent effects: FXBOX, Meris Polymoon
Into the Light [15:16]:
Guitar: Harley Benton 8 string
Prominent effects: FXBOX, Meris Polymoon
The Guitars:
The Twin-neck guitar is (probably) Chinese in origin. One neck is a 6-string, tuned conventionally E-A-D-G-B-E; one is a 12-string, tuned to a Dm open chord. It is wired in stereo, with the 6-string and 12-string in mono on separate outputs.
The Gibson SG Standard dates from 1969. It is also in conventional tuning.
The Harley Benson is tuned B-E-A-D-G-B-E-A with a special high A string from Octave4Plus.
The Effects:
The pedalboard is a mixture of series and parallel effects. The Drone section consists mainly of 3 Electro-Harmonix pedals, the Superego, the Small Stone phaser, and the Stereo Pulsar; the loops are mostly output via a Wampler Terraform and Hall of Fame reverb; and the main Hi and Lo channels use a Rolls mini crossover and other effects, principally the Meris Polymoon delay pedal. The Electro-Harmonix Attack Decay saves me having to use a volume pedal for swells and slow attack notes.
In addition to these, in the 'laptop' channel an old white Macbook runs effects using Pure Data in a format I have designated the FXBOX (pronounced 'Ef-ex-Box'), controlled by a repurposed game controller PCB and footswitches, and a Korg Nanokontrol. There are actually 4 versions of the FXBOX. On Carried on the Wind, I'm using the granular synthesis version; on 'Into the Light', I use the Ring Modulator version.
The Recording:
The output of all the guitar channels went from the pedalboard mixer to an M-Audio Fast Track Pro audio interface and into an iPhone, via a USB/lightning adapter, recording a stereo 44.1k 32 bit WAV file in the Hokusai 2 app. Editing was done in Audacity on a Macbook Pro.
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