ON SAMPLING:
Sunday I spent the afternoon digging through records I got at a yard sale searching for samples to fill the gaps in EX-PITCHER. Sampling is tough! A lot of close listening snap judgements need to be made in order to quickly sift through a ton of material. After a few hours I finally found a couple pieces and called it a day.
The next day (Monday Feb 1st) I used the SK-5 sampling keyboard along with a delay and overdrive pedal to add some keyboard parts to EX-PITCHER and ASPIRING LIGHTING TECHNICIAN. I’ve used the technique of singing into an SK keyboard (usually an SK-1) a few times on past albums. It sounds great but the downside is that you can never recreate the sound again perfectly.  There is a part in the story of ALT in which the main character performs a light show to a section of the Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky. The song features the nutcracker melody as the listener imagines the light show. This was partly inspired by one of my favorite parts of any song: Roll Over Beethoven by Chuck Berry. Chuck sings to Beethoven (his corpse or his ghost?) and tell’s him to pass along the news to Tchaikovsky: classical music is out, rock is here to stay.
