|
Jason Didner Instruments used in the making of “American Road”
Ovation Ultra roundback acoustic guitar With a bright, vibrant sound that cuts through the PA systems my live performances and mics beautifully in the studio, this guitar also boasts great playability. Acoustic guitars are most prominently featured on Building Up/Wall of Sound and Glass Half Full from the American Road CD. Kramer Focus 3000 electric guitar Popularized by Eddie Van Halen in the early 80's, this guitar maker has left a legacy of axes with great feel, impressive ability to stay in tune, and a broad range of tones, from warm to edgy. The Focus 3000 features a Strat body and a bridge humbucker with single coil pickups in the middle and neck positions. I've replaced the stock humbucker with a Seymour Duncan Full Shred, which really grabs those pinch harmonics and Floyd Rose tremolo dive-bombs that Eddie made famous. Songs featuring my play on the Kramer include the “American Road” title track and “A Day in my Cave.” The touch on this guitar was unbelievable. All I had to do was “think” a note and it would play bright and clean. With its neck-thru-body design, it is very much on par with the Gibson Les Paul series. When I want more of a throaty blues tone or don't need a whammy bar, I'll record with this axe with the twin-humbucker pickups. The Ibanez is most prominently featured in “Stand Tall United.” Reasonably playable, this bass offers a good variation of tones, whether picked or fingered. Single coil pickups in the neck and bridge positions allow for more of a warm or cutting tone. I used this bass on every track except for “Will You Be my Brother?” where Pete Romanowski (a.k.a. Europica) did the honors. Roland FP-1 digital piano with Sonic Implants SoundFonts The weighted keys on the Roland FP-1 keyboard provide the true-to-life touch of an acoustic piano. Not an easy keyboard to lug to a gig, but the rewards are enoromous in the feel of playing it. The acoustic piano sound is a little truer using a good SoundFont through the SoundBlaster card than the onboard preset piano sound in the keyboard. Sonic Implants’ RetroSynth set added some dead-on Mellotron sounds to my pallette, mixed into the “American Road” title track. With just a bit of reverb on the bongos, I was able to give them a big enough sound to drive the tempo forward without taking away from the intimate acoustic feel of “My Gentle Warrior” and “Glass Half Full.” I tapped the center of the low bongo to correspond with what a kick drum would do, and the edge of the high bongo for a tighter, snare effect. A standard egg shaker played the role you might expect of a hi-hat cymbal. Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 Recording Software A versatile tool for sequencing MIDI tracks and recording and processing live audio, Cakewalk gave me the necessary tools to meticulously program the drum patterns, arrange multiple layers of organ, string and piano voices, and then layer high-quality audio recordings of guitar, voice and hand percussion. The mixing console interface was a reliable counterpart to the recording features, allowing me to apply subtle effects including compression and reverb, and prorgram volume levels to change automatically as the song called for dynamics. Gateway PC with SoundBlaster Live! soundcard and AMD Athlon processor Anticipating my need for multiple tracks and as many takes as necessary to carry out my vision, I equipped my Gateway PC with 60 gigabytes of hard disk storage and 256 megabytes of RAM. The built-in SoundBlaster Live! card provided sufficient headroom to record the audio tracks true-to-life. |
© 2003, Way Forward Records. It is illegal to make unauthorized copies of this site's content.