Making Friends combines electronic elements, classical forms, and jazz harmonic structures to create a musical dialect with the content alternating between discordant instrumental sound collages and lush vocal pop epics.

9 MP3 Songs
ELECTRONIC: Experimental, ROCK: Emo



Details:
MAKING FRIENDS

THIS NEW CD INCLUDES AN ORIGINAL DESIGN OF A HYBRID BASS, 15 STRING GUITAR WITH A METAL KEY PAD AND MORE â¦

MAKING FRIENDS combines electronic elements, classical forms, and jazz harmonic structures to create a musical dialect with the content alternating between discordant instrumental sound collages and lush vocal pop epics. Her original instrument designs include a 15 string guitar with a metal key pad, an oscillator and a hybrid bass with a stereo output. These instruments create unique sounds and add to the CDâs musical journey.

In 2001, she started recording Making Friends after she built her analog home studio in San Francisco. âI wanted do everything myself, from building the gear in my studio to mixing and producing the record.â So, thatâs what I did.â Then, after a cross-country move to the Northeast in 2004, she chucked her analog tape decks, bought ProTools , and finished Making Friends in her Brooklyn apartment in 2006. âI brought a lot of musician friends into my studio to play the horn and drum parts; and I played all of the other instruments, along with some instruments I designed and / or built myself,â says Norwich.

One of the main instruments used on the recording is Aimeeâs original design of a hybrid bass. It is a modified ¾ scale Fender bass. The three highest strings are piccolo strings, which are in the guitar register, and are on a different circuit than the E bass string. The E string has a custom one-string bass pickup and the piccolo strings use a guitar pickup. There is a stereo output which allows Aimee to split the signal and run the bass and piccolo strings on separate signal paths; thus allowing her to play bass and guitar parts simultaneously through different amplifiers. The oscillator she built, with a customized chassis and other added components, may be heard in the ending noise landscape on the last song, I Never (reprise). Finally she uses a 15 string guitar
with a metal key pad and nails hammered into the neck by her design. With its percussive, metallic, saw-like timbre, it adds a wall of sound in the middle of the horn-embedded track, 25 Summers. âI got into instrument design many years ago. I like making things that no one else has, it gives me more of an original soundâ

I came across a fascinating musician today Aimee Norwich, she plays bass but makes it sound like a million different instruments... - Howard Jones