I came across a really interesting tenor and bass saxophone player from Oslo, Norway. His name is Håkon Kornstad, and his video on YouTube is very unique. This was recorded live on September 27, 2008, at Victoria, Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo.
The first time I watched it, I almost didn’t make it to the 2 minute mark when he started to play. Once he started on tenor however, his tone had me hooked. Then when he got his bass out, I was wowed.
The use of the loop machine was quite ingenious IMHO. This is the kind of stuff I’d love to do, but I had a hard enough time figuring out how to use my wireless mike set-up. 😉
If you’d like to know more about Håkon Kornstad, check out his website.
Wow, sometimes I feel silly for even trying.
I just got a delay pedal and it has a “hold” feature so I can run a loop indefinitely, but it only has a maximum delay time of 1.3 seconds. This is not enough to be useful as a looper so I’ll stick to using it as a delay.
It’s still an improvement over what I was using before, a Yamaha REX50 — a 12-bit effects unit from the late 1980’s. It only had a maximum delay of 500 ms and no looping capability. It was enough for the tracks I put up on YouTube the July 18-19 weekend, but the short maximum delay was rather confining.
No bass sax, though the “Deep Space Network” portion of Solar Voyage does have my C-mel shifted down an octave, which sounds fairly convincing as an ersatz bass sax. Too bad I would not be able to do it live, as the unshifted sound would be heard directly.
I did another over the past weekend as well. Though it has no delay in it, it does have the vocal harmonizer front and center:
(Since the spam filter will not allow me to post links to each video, I will instead link to one page that has them embedded.)
http://cmelodysax.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=104#p531
These were probably near-perfect conditions as far as straight-ahead jazz goes, so I do not hold out much hope for using the vocal harmonizer in that setting. It’s just entirely too twitchy. It’s one thing for it to be wrong (which it is often enough) but another to be indecisive. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was sometimes wrong, if it would just pick a harmony and stick with it till the next chord comes along.
It’s quite useful if fed a fairly constant set of block chords (as it was for Fire Dance), or if I let it guess at a key and I follow it rather than the other way around (as it was for Solar Voyage). It would probably be pretty useful in a rock or funk setting. It doesn’t seem like it has to be THAT much smarter to do what I really want, but it definitely has to be more confident. How do you make a computer more confident? :scratch:
If you want to see the potential in massive self-overdubbing by looping, check out Kid Beyond:
He does everything with noises he generates by mouth alone.
I had a response, but the WordPress electronic censors thought it was too spammy (without explaining what that means).
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Hmmm, your comment seems a bit spammy. We’re not real big on spam around here.
Please go back and try again.
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Not a very helpful error message.
You’re right. It’s not at all helpful. I’ve not had anyone ever say they’ve had this problem before. Since you’re an approved commenter already, it’s doubly strange.
Thanks for forwarding me the whole comment you wrote though, that did give me a hint. I think it had to do with the number of external links. I adjusted the limit upwards, so if that was the reason for the message, all should be OK now.
Try posting your comment again and see what happens. If you get the same “don’t you be spamming me” message, please email me.
According to the settings, any email with 5 or more external links should have been held in a queue, but yours is not there. Weird… Gremlins…